[asterisk-dev] Zaptel Transcoder issues (and possible conflict with PRI cards)

[Sebastian Auriol]

I noticed some time ago in zaptel/asterisk 1.4 (previously trunk) that
support for the zaptel transcoder (zttranscode) was added. However I've
noticed several issues that this seems to have caused on our servers that
have PRI cards installed (and not the transcoder cards).

1. Zaptel doesn't unload properly with zaptel.init, which I reported with
bug ID 7981 a couple of months ago.

2. The Zaptel Transcoder support is loaded when I start asterisk and not
when I start zaptel via zaptel.init.
   This is despite me not having a transcoder card installed. This has the
following effect:
	1. With asterisk stopped, I start zaptel and all the PRIs come into
service ("Clearing yellow alarm on span X").
	2. I start asterisk and suddenly I get "Zaptel Transcoder support
loaded";
		it looks like a ztcfg happens ("About to enter spanconfig!"
etc.);
		I get "wct4xxp: Setting yellow alarm on span 1" for all
spans;
		then "wct4xxp: Clearing yellow alarm on span 1" for all
spans;
		and then if I connect to asterisk I see that there is
basically an 80%+ chance that at least
            one of the spans will keep going into and out of service
continuously every few seconds.
	3. The best solution I have come up with so far to cure this is to
power down the server completely,
	   boot it back up and try again. Just stopping Asterisk and
restarting doesn't help.
	   Stopping Asterisk and Zaptel and restarting them doesn't help.
Rebooting occasionally works.
         But powering down works much better, but still doesn't work every
time.
	   (I am using Wildcard TE410P (2nd Gen) TE4XXP version c01a0164.)

So my questions are:
(a) why does the Zaptel Transcoder support load when asterisk is started as
opposed to when zaptel is started?
(b) how can I stop it loading?

The PRI problem is for your information. (I don't have this problem with
spans oscillating with the same hardware and zaptel / asterisk 1.2.x.)

Kind regards,

Sebastian 
 
 
___________________________________________
Sebastian Auriol
Syntec Telecom  
http://www.syntec.co.uk/