[Asterisk-Users] Small office setup/using analog lines w/ Asterisk

[jennyw]

Karl S. Katzke wrote:

> Ooh. Jenny, your problem might be the motherboard. (I should know, I 
> run that same motherboard at home as my gaming machine.) It's a piece 
> of crud. 

Oh, great. ;-) For next time, does anyone have recommendations for a 
particular motherboard or a particular type of motherboard?

> I wouldn't worry about the AGP running on there, but do make sure that 
> X-windows isn't running on the box. If the consultant you hired 
> installed a graphical environment, please give me his name and address 
> so that I can drive over and kick him next time I'm visiting my sister.

X isn't installed, so you can spend more time w/ your sister. ;-)

> Otherwise, yeah, what you've got is overkill. The Sempron and half a 
> gig of RAM would be more than enough for you, and RAID is nice but you 
> could probably have gotten away with software RAID or using the 
> onboard softraid. I'm not even running RAID.

This is for an office -- I figured that running hardware RAID would be 
the most likely to avoid downtime if a hard drive failed. How do most 
people handle this?

> My clicking went away after I rewired my PSTN boxes. The contractor 
> that wired them put them in 2-up ganged boxes, (2 jacks in each box, 2 
> lines running into each box) and that caused far too much 
> interference. Replacing the wiring from the punchdown to the boxes and 
> then the boxes themselves not only eliminated the clicking, it 
> cancelled a good half of the echo. I still have some echo and I just 
> had a call drop out unexpectedly with 'congestion'... gotta figure out 
> how to fix that.

The phone lines are wired to a patch panel (RJ45). Plugging in cheap 
analog phones work great -- they get very clear sound.

More on sound quality -- when making calls from one extension to 
another, the volume level is much, much better. However, we still get 
echo. So this might not be a problem with the Digium cards (or not only 
with the Digium cards). The clicking noises are intermittent -- they 
don't happen all the time. So the next thing to try might be to get 
better phones.

Currently, we're using Sipura SPA-841 phones. I hear the Polycoms are 
much better. Does that apply to all Polycoms? For example, what's the 
sound diff. between a Sipura SPA-841, a Polycom SoundPoint IP 301, and a 
Polycom SoundPoint IP 501?

Thanks!

Jen