[asterisk-dev] A plan for span

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Shaun Ruffell wrote:

> But if you do something like that, you would still need an option to wait until 
> all the devices are present before you start Asterisk.  But at least the 
> hotplug script could then register the devices as they show up if that is 
> important (?)

Keep in mind that we already have users who can't seem to figure out the
ID switches on their dual/quad span cards, and that causes the exact
sort of problem you are trying to avoid here. The driver can't know when
all the cards in the system have been found, so if it turns out that the
card with the ID switch set to zero has failed (or has been removed),
none of the other cards get initialized and the system is broken.

While I certainly agree that Asterisk's chan_dahdi would need lots of
improvement to be able to take full advantage of the dynamic nature of
Oron's suggestion, I don't see that as a reason not to consider taking
the first few steps, leaving the rest for when we have the time and/or
motivation to deal with them. If we can find a way to make these changes
that doesn't put a huge burden on chan_dahdi users in the near term, the
benefits in the long term would be significant.

I cannot tell you how many times I was sitting at my colo data center
trying to work with a telco technician on a T1 circuit problem and had
to refer to my cheatsheet when running zttool to be able to remember
which port of which card corresponded to which circuit ID... if I had
been able to actually use those circuit IDs to name the spans, my life
would have been much easier :-)

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Director of Software Technologies
Digium, Inc. - "The Genuine Asterisk Experience" (TM)