[Asterisk-Users] RE: *, Fritz!PCI and strange behavior

[Patrick Lidstone (Personal E-mail)]

> I'm testing * (CVS-09/16/03-02:07:49 with zaprtc 0.0.1) with Fritz!PCI

> (chan_capi 0.3.0), and have a couple of funny things - I wonder if 
> anyone else has seen them:
> 
> - Now and then, * just exits. Until now I had lowish-level
> verbosity on,
>   so all I saw was 'Executing last minute cleanups'. What can trigger
>   * exits? (in other words, what should I pay attention to when
>   attempting to debug this?)

I have seen Asterisk spontaneously exit very occasionally, but not at 
this particular point.
 
> - Very often, after * runs for a while, it stops recognizing incoming
>   ISDN calls and refuses to send out ISDN calls.

I have this. If I try to dial out, I get an "all channels are busy at 
this time" error, when they are not.

>The funny thing is, 
>   restarting * or CAPI doesn't work - I have to shutdown both, unplug
>   and replug the ISDN cable, and then after startup everything works
>   again. At first, I thought that it might be a bad cable, so I taped
>   down everything in order to prevent it from moving. This
> didn't help.
>   I really do not understand why the thing with the cable is 
> necessary.

Straight asterisk restart always clears this condition for me.
 
> Any light that you can shine on this would be most helpful. OBTW: the 
> answer "don't use a Fritz" is not applicable here - I'm trying to 
> assess the feasibility of making a <300$ ISDN SoHo PBX...

I think the problem may be related to call progress indication from the
ISDN line. I have UK ISDN2e (packaged as Business Highway - which
includes what is effectively a telco-owned TA with two analogue ports).
I have noticed that outgoing channels getting tied up corresponds to
placing a call which is terminated prematurely (e.g. hangup before
completing dialing) or dialing a call which can't be completed because
the dialed PSTN subscriber number is invalid. I've learned to live with
it - but it would be great to get to the bottom of it.

Patrick