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

[Karl S. Katzke]

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

Next time, I'd actually buy a Dell SC420 or something similar. :-P

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

Aww, drat ... I mean, thanks! ;)

>> 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?

Hardware RAID is mostly important if you're going to be doing a LOT of 
high-capacity read/writing, and want to be able to get another 
controller that speaks the same language in case the controller goes 
out. Semi-soft raid, the kind that's on the motherboard, isn't good 
because you lose your data if the mobo controller goes bad. Linux 
software raid would be just as versatile in this situation, and a lot 
cheaper. ;) I wouldn't reccomend it for an office with 50 or 60 or more 
people that's doing a lot of voicemail read/writes, but for your 
purposes...

>> 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.

I'm having some volume fluctuation problems with the SPA-841 phones, 
which I have as well. The next phone I'm ordering will be something 
that's a lot more expensive, so I'll let you know if that fixes it... 
but I'd put a nice network card in your *server before I'd replace all 
of your phones.

-K