[Asterisk-Users] I give up!!

[Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk]

Asterisk...
Linux...
You get what you pay for. And it's free
:P

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 15:21, Dave Alan Caruana wrote:
> 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
> 
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