[Asterisk-Users] Zaprtc seems unsupported, Asterisk in production environment without Digium cards

[Jon Brüel]

I feel there is some unclarity about the need for a timer in Asterisk. As
Asterisk moves into production environments, this needs to be sorted out.

I'm setting up an Asterisk in a production environment with no Digium cards
at all. It is planned to be used as a clean SIP hosted PABX, where we
connect to the PSTN via gateways with proper echo cancellation. There is no
USB driver on the card. Running Linux 2.6

>From some of the documents, I understand that some applications such as
music on hold need a timer to function well and to function in order to
achieve a good sound quality without high processor overhead.

In our test environment, zaprtc seems to be the right solution, but there
are no places, where I can find a functioning and well tested timer for
Asterisk on Linux 2.6 without having to go through diff-files and patch
commands. And still, I can't get it to work. Much has been wiritten about
this without any solutions. In any case, zaprtc does not seem to be built
into Asterisk on the same level as e.g. the well tested applications.

My questions are:

1) Is a timer such as zaprtc required?
2) Where can I acquire such a timer which will work with Linux 2.6?
3) Is it generally recommended to use Asterisk with at least one Digium
card?
4) Will future versions of Asterisk be designed with a "build in" timing
source?