X100P mod or USB relay box, RE: [Asterisk-Users] Line Override Device

[Steven Critchfield]

On Mon, 2003-07-14 at 12:10, Reed Wade wrote:
> At 11:34 AM 7/14/2003 -0500, Steven Critchfield wrote:
> 
> 
> >One wouldn't use a X100P in a "serious" system.
> 
> 
> How so? I assume you're talking about scale and not
> reliability. We get a relatively small number of calls
> but any one of them could be worth a large stack of
> cash for our business. A stinky phone system can make
> us look bad.
> 
> The main reason I'm looking at Asterisk is to improve
> the reliability and control over our phone system.
> All the other great things it provides really are
> secondary for the folks who pay my salary.

I agree that reliability is THE most important item on a phone system,
and if you read the list you will see that most the problems are analog
related. So my point is that analog signaling is too problematic for a
phone system most of the time. 

> >Only if you aren't pulling power from the USB bus. There isn't much
> >there.
> 
> There may be just enough depending on how many relays are needed,
> but it would be too close. I agree, better off not trying to get
> power from there.
> 
> I do like the idea of some kind of watchdog functionality. Simply
> having power isn't sufficient to trust that a call is getting
> routed.

This makes me think that you could take this a step further too and
incorporate an external power supply and a relay that could interupt
mains power so that you could power cycle the PC if the watchdog had
power to operate and the PC wasn't responding or generating pings. Then
a properly configured machine would start the services up on it's own
and move on. This power cycle type of device would have saved me a few
minutes of downtime the other day when I froze the kernel on our main
phone system. As it was, I just called our colo facility and told them
what machine to power cycle.
-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>