[Asterisk-Users] Alternatives to the T100Ps?

[Michael Loftis]

--On Sunday, October 17, 2004 10:31 -0400 Brian Kurkowski 
<brian at mhcommunications.com> wrote:

> Michael,
>
> I usually read and don't do much posting, but I had to on this.

Sorry things getting badly buried lately....  recent reply brought this 
thread back to my attention and I realised I'd missed this post.

> I am really suprised to see your commnets, and wondered what is the basis
> ? We have had a dual Xenon with a quad port T1 card in production for 16
> months processing as many as 20,000 messaging calls a day. The box has
> never crashed, the board has never crashed, we haven't even restarted
> asterisk much less upgraded the code. I have never take a Bit Error on my
> DMS-500 from a Digium card. This is only one of several "production
> boxes" but the story is the same on all of them.
>
> How in the heck does this equate to:  "hardware, drivers, or both is
> pretty sketchy" ?

The fact that they are REALLY picky on what they work in, and they either 
work really well (as in your case) or (as in my example) cause the system 
to go totally flake when it's otherwise been known to run excellently in 
all situations.  Whether it's hardware being picky, drivers being somewhat 
bad behavior or something else I'm not sure.  The 1kHz clock that they keep 
should be easily followed by any modern hardware -- I've built applications 
based around faster interrupt rates on less hardware (Intel and AMD based).

> I would suggest just the opposite. Mark and the boys have done a great job
> on all fronts. How many Cisco AS-5300's have that record ? I have 9 of
> them brand new and not a single one is my answer.

There's no doubt that Digium brought this card into mass production, 
cleaned it up, improved upon it, and have done so steadily since it's 
creation.  I also have no doubt whatsoever that they will continue to do 
so, and very aggressively.  We'll probably also start to see more products 
coming from them, I have no idea what but they have a lot of smart folks 
over there.

>
> If you haven't looked at Digium lately, look again.

I've got two of their cards right now :)  That's what sparked the whole 
thread.

I don't mind paying more, neither do most businesses, for hardware that's 
more solid, or handles a given task better.  I suppose with the Digium 
boards I could dive into the VHDL and reprogram the FPGA if I find any 
problems.  I just don't know the current state of all of those bits.

The PBX we've built seems ot be very stable in it's new motherboard, but 
it's still very...curious that it behaved so badly in a known good 
motherboard with more than enough horsepower -- 1.4Ghz clock -- AMD Athlon 
1800+, w/ 1.5Gig of RAM, all clean, tested pretty regularly with memtest86 
and other diagnostics as I use it for a bench machine.

Though I think it more likely had more to do with some unhealthy 
interaction on the motherboard and card rather than one or the other, which 
seems to be reported occasionally by T100P buyers, and the TDM400P also 
seems to have some similar issues.

Now the fact that there are so many configurations under which the T100P 
and TDM400P work VERY well means that the fundamentals are absolutely 
right, there's just some sort of edge case.  I just happen to be of the 
opinion that the real world is an edge case so if you can't handle a fairly 
common COTS setup like the system I described above, then there's something 
that needs some pretty good improvement somewhere.

The whole thing is just my opinions and thoughts, and tempered by the 
(relatively bad) experience I had getting these cards going because they 
just would not play with any motherboard I threw at them until we went for 
rather top of the line motherboard.