[Asterisk-Users] I give up!!

[Dave Alan Caruana]

i've just lost $2000 dollars or so on my first commercial asterisk
installation ..
i'm running a PIV class server, three Digium Wildcard FXO cards, and
10 Grandstream Budgettone SIP phones. The system was to be a PBX
for a small company. After over 2 months of pissing about, the client has
had his fill of asterisk problems, and asked me to take my equipment
out of the building. Obviously, I haven't been paid for anything.

The problems I faced were the following :
- initially a problem with asterisk crashing totally when there wasn't an
extension
  to ring .. though this was fixed in a subsequent CVS, it was causing
downtime.
  the client has no unix knowledge, and a script I put in to kick in the
asterisk
  when it shut itself down didn't seem to always work.

  it also reduced the quality of my subsequent callout requests to something
on
  the lines of "the phone server is crashed again" regardless of what the
problem was

- a dialplan problem, where one phone was ringing 10 seconds after the
others,
   at the client's request and they were hearing other phones ring and
picking up
   a non-ringing phone (ok, I can't really blame that on asterisk ..)

- echo on the lines .. that after much fiddling around with configurations
went from
   terrible to borderline acceptable. To people not used to digital
telephony and
   computer stuff, the echo was VERY annoying. They used to avoid the phones
   because they said people would not understand them.

- no consultative transfer. The closest I got was to park the call, call the
other party,
  tell him "a voce" which line the call is parked on and then get him to
pick up the call.
  This is, in my opinion, a very basic feature that is missing on asterisk.
The park/
  pick up sequence proved too difficult for the clients' secretaries to
grasp.

- I could not get G729 working properly (license paid up, G729 up and
running). In
  the absence of a manual, the fault solving process was something like "ask
a question
  on the mailing list, get a few answers, go to the client, try it out,
fail, go back home,
  send another question on the mailinglist" with about 48 hours for each
iteration. I was
  also appearing a real chimp "expermimenting" stuff at the clients' office.

At this point I decided to cut my losses, retreive the equipment and call it
a day.
When asterisk is well documented and released in stable releases, I will
willingly
consider it again. I would be willing to pay for a stable, documented
version of
asterisk. It is a lovely software, and to begin with I was very enthusiastic
about it.
I do understand that the support community is helpful, but the current
status of things
limits asterisk to a hobbyist scenario or at least somewhere where there is
an engineer
with lots of linux experience and patience online 24 hours to solve problems
as they
crop up.

If anyone would like a couple of second hand FXO boards, contact me. I have
already found a home for the grandstreams.

cheers
Dave