[asterisk-users] ztdummy does not load properly at server startup

[Matthew J. Roth]

Theo,

Unless things have changed significantly in the newer releases, you must 
load zaptel prior to loading ztdummy.  Additionally, the zaptel devices 
are not created instantly, so after you load zaptel you must wait a few 
seconds before loading ztdummy.  You can perform some sort of polling if 
you want to script this, but a less sophisticated method is just to 
sleep for 10 or 15 seconds between the calls to modprobe.

If your goal is to start Asterisk automatically at boot, some init 
scripts for different distributions are available at 
<http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.4/contrib/init.d/>.  I'm 
using Fedora, so I installed 'rc.redhat.asterisk' with chkconfig as follows:

# install -m 755 ./rc.redhat.asterisk /etc/rc.d/init.d/asterisk
# chkconfig --add asterisk
# chkconfig --list asterisk
asterisk        0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

Note that I made the following customizations to the script prior to 
installing it:

* I don't want to run safe_asterisk, so I comment out all of the lines 
that reference the SAFE_ASTERISK variable.
* I want to load ztdummy and raise the open file limit, so I add the 
following lines to the start() function immediately prior to the 
'daemon' statement:
     modprobe zaptel > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
     sleep 15
     modprobe ztdummy > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
     ztcfg > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
     ulimit -n 65536 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
* And add the following lines to the stop() function, immediately after 
the 'RETVAL=$?' line:
     rmmod ztdummy > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
     rmmod zaptel > /dev/null 2> /dev/null

Things will differ depending on your distribution, but that should be 
enough to get you going in the right direction.

Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer