[asterisk-users] OpenVox G400P / G400E -- a warning

[A J Stiles]

I recently had a nightmare building up some servers with these OpenVox cards.

Although I have used them successfully in the past, the chan_extra driver 
building process has always been highly temperamental  (although to be fair, 
they have always worked fine once any necessary tweaking was done).

However, chan_extra will not build against the latest DAHDI; and older DAHDI 
versions will not build against the stock kernels in Debian Jessie or Ubuntu 
Precise.  I was just fortunate that the motherboards worked with Debian 
Wheezy.

OpenVox have advised that the G400P/E is an end-of-life product and as such, 
updating its drivers is not a priority for them.  And I am not sufficiently 
qualified in low-level programming to fix this myself.  They recommend their GSM 
gateways  (which I have not yet evaluated)  instead.


If anyone is thinking of using these cards for a project in the near future, 
make sure the motherboard that you are about to use will boot an old kernel  
(Wheezy has 3.2.0-4)  in order to be able to use sufficiently old versions of 
Asterisk and DAHDI  (1.8.22 and 2.7.0 + 2.7.0 definitely work with chan_extra 
2.0.8; I grabbed the .tar.gz files straight out of /usr/src on a similar 
machine I built earlier).  And it probably wouldn't be the best idea to have 
the machine facing the public Internet while it's running such obsolete 
software.  Fortunately, these ones will be safely on the inside of a firewall.


See also here:  http://www.openvox.cn/forum/gsm-wcdma-series/2910-g400e-
chan_extra-2-0-8-needs-old-software.html


-- 
AJS

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