[asterisk-users] TDM 400 hardware(?) issue

[Greg Woods]

I am having to abandon asterisk after having used it for 2.5 years due
to this problem. Every couple of days (sometimes more often, sometimes
less), the machine will lock up because the TDM board or the Dahdi
driver goes south. /var/log/messages starts filling up with repeated
messages:

kernel: TDM PCI Master abort

The card I have is:

*CLI> dahdi show status
Description                              Alarms     IRQ        bpviol
CRC4      
Wildcard TDM400P REV I Board 5           OK         0          0
0         


I asked about this once before and I am asking again in desperation, as
I have had to shut off my asterisk server, take all the VOIP phones out
of service, and go back to the bad old days of a single cordless phone
base with a couple of handsets and a crappy old WalMart answering
machine. This sucks.

Last time I asked, the most helpful answer I got was privately, saying
that either my card is bad, or I might need a different motherboard (but
there is no way I know of to know which motherboards would work and
which would not; the last thing I would want is to go through the
expense and major hassle of swapping motherboards only to find out that
the problem is not fixed).

The only decent diagnostic I have is that if I catch it soon enough,
before the system totally locks up, then stopping asterisk, restarting
dahdi, and starting asterisk gets things working again (until the next
incident). Also, I can go into asterisk -r and do "dahdi show status"
and the card doesn't have any alarms; the output is the same as above,
even as the PCI Master abort messages are spewing into the syslog.

If my Wildcard TDM board is bad, is there anything I can do about it, or
am I just S.O.L. after this much time? The blasted card costs as much as
a new machine; either way I can't afford it right now. I don't want to
abandon asterisk as it has so many nice features, but I am running low
on alternatives at the moment.

--Greg