[Asterisk-Users] I give up!!

[Andy Hester]

Dave,
	I sympathize greatly with your plight.  I just had a similar experience
myself, although I managed to salvage it before I was asked to remove it
from the building.  I was using Pingtel phones that were supposed to "work
great with Asterisk" but instead crashed all the time.  Then I got the Sip
bug that caused * to stop responding when doing a cvs update for work
arounds for the phones.  I ended up pulling the Pingtel phones and replacing
with Smartalk analog phones.  Everyone seems to be fairly happy right now,
but it has been a huge nightmare and a huge learning experience.  One thing
I learned is that Asterisk is very capable even in production, but if your
going to implement it you had better make sure that you can do full blown
testing before implementing initially and again for any changes.  I am very
wary of CVS updates now...

	Quite a few people are making a concerted effort to make documentation
better and I think this will help quite a bit.

Sincerely,
Andy Hester
Consero

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com
> [mailto:asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com]On Behalf Of Dave Alan
> Caruana
> Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 8:21 AM
> To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
> Subject: [Asterisk-Users] I give up!!
>
>
> 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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