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

[jennyw]

Karl S. Katzke wrote:

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

Honestly, I'm really scared of Dell hardware. Some of the most messed up 
computers I've worked on have come from Dell. I hear their servers are 
better than their laptops and desktops, but having only experienced the 
bad, it's hard to imagine the good.

> 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...

The main regret I have about hardware RAID is that the card is sharing 
an IRQ with one of the Digium cards. This whole IRQ thing is driving me 
crazy ... I disabled everything I could in BIOS and that freed up some 
IRQs, but there's no way to assign a particular IRQ to a particular 
device. I haven't had to think about IRQs in a long time, and it's very 
frustrating. I'd still like to hear about hardware suggestions that 
could avoid this or make this better in the future. Like, are there 
motherboards that let you assign IRQ to devices?

> 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. 

I'd love to hear how the higher end phone does. If anyone else has 
experiences comparing phones, I'd love to hear them.

Since I get echo and popping noises even when I'm dialing from one 
extension to another (no Digium card involved), I'm guessing that the 
problem is at least partly the telephones. Of course, the sound quality 
is better in other ways (e.g. both sides of the line are clearer), so 
maybe there are some problems with the Digium cards, too.

Jen