[Asterisk-Users] Alternatives to the T100Ps?

[Cirelle Enterprises]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Loftis" <mloftis at wgops.com>
To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion" <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 6:14 PM
Subject: RE: [Asterisk-Users] Alternatives to the T100Ps?


| 
| 
| --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.
| 

Michael, are you successfully routing data over the t100p card as well as voice?

Greg