[Asterisk-Users] 2 4-port T1 cards

[Steven Critchfield]

On Tue, 2003-05-27 at 16:05, Joe Antkowiak wrote:
> Are there any known issues with putting 2 4-port T1 cards in a single box
> and having all ports and all channels in use at the same time?  Planning on
> 4 of these boxes, dual AMD cpu MB from MSI, 512m, redhat 9, agp video, on
> board NICs, serial ata raid.  

Newbie 101		(Not deragatory)
1. What are you doing with these ports?
	If you are routing calls from one side of the cards to the
 	other, then you should have no problems with a 1gig P3 or so.
 	But if you are doing more than routing, it will depend on what
 	that something is, and what kind of overhead it is going to 
	impose.
2. RH blows chunks. (Personal opinion)
	RH is known to make kitchen sink installs when you don't need 
	them, and would be better off without most of the install base.
3. Dual MB won't help much in pure telephony.
	In pure telephony, you are basically dealing with serial line 
	IO. A T1 is little more than I long distance serial line. 8 T1s 
	is just 11.7megs per second each way, or 23.4 megs in and out. 
	Not too much for a good machine to do. Granted, if you are doing 	VoIP
then you add another set of ins and outs with compression in 	the middle
of it too. This is where the second CPU comes in handy.
4. AGP Video.
	Make sure not to use the frame buffer, it has been reported that 	the
frame buffer generates large amounts of interupts and will 
	degrade the performance.
 
Here is for discussion as it is parts I don't know real well. Will the
serial ATA buy you any flexibilty or lowered CPU load while accessing
the disk? Don't take this question as shooting down the SATA, just don't
know if there is real benefit in it yet.

Also what chipset is the onboard nics? 

-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>