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

[Darrick Hartman]

On 12/21/2009 05:34 PM, Steve Totaro wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Greg Woods <greg at gregandeva.net
> <mailto:greg at gregandeva.net>> wrote:
>
>     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

Greg,

Why don't you contact Digium tech support?  They should be able to help 
you narrow down the problem.  Cards do go bad from time to time.

Now on to Steve's reply...

> How many lines are you talking about?  In light of your budget issues, I
> would switch to quality SIP provider and have my numbers ported.
>
> That would most likely be cheaper in the long and short run, and more
> reliable depending on the vendor and your internet connection.

I agree, especially for a small office or home.  You can set up most SIP 
providers to failover to your cell phone if there is a problem with the 
SIP connection.  Do this and you won't need a hardware card.

> Other options are going back to old versions of Asterisk.  What version
> are you running?  What was wrong with the version from 1.5 years ago?
> Maybe your card likes being a Zap device, rather than a DAHDI.

Seriously?  This makes no sense at all.  Even early TDM400p cards will 
work with dahdi, usually better than they did with zaptel, but no worse. 
  The version of Asterisk and zaptel from 1.5 years ago is likely full 
of bugs that have been fixed by recent versions.  Are you still driving 
your 1978 Ford Pinto?  Someone from Digium made a post to that effect a 
week or so ago.  If you're running version 1.4, you should be running 
1.4.28 with the latest version of dahdi.

> You could make a cron job to reboot the machine at midnight, daily.

Bandaid/ducttape?  The only thing this may 'solve' is a memory leak. 
It's really hiding the underlying problem.

> I have a box full of Digium cards with all sorts of modules, I could
> "sell" you what you need for the price of postage but I really think SIP
> is your silver bullet.

That would be nice of you, but he should find out the problem before 
throwing more hardware at the issue.

Darrick
-- 
Darrick Hartman
DJH Solutions, LLC
http://www.djhsolutions.com