[Asterisk-Users] Small office setup/using analog lines w/ Ast erisk

[Colin Anderson]

	>I've never heard about IO-APIC before, so I just did a Google
search. 
	>The articles I found say that it's an Intel thing, and, since I
have an 
	>AMD processor w/ ASUS motherboard, it's unlikely it'll work, right?


Not Intel thing. Chipset thing:

http://www.amdboard.com/via_k8t400m.html (scroll to the bottom)

Problem is, there is not consistient implementation of the spec across
chipsets so APIC will choke sometimes. That's why there's the "noapic"
kernel boot option. I use that option myself, all the time, both on Intel
and AMD. 

Give it a try. At this point you need options. Also, keep a detailed log of
what you did, and what the result is. If you change a whole bunch of stuff,
and suddenly it's better, what made it better? With a log you know, and then
it's reproducible. 

>The main regret I have about hardware RAID is that the card is sharing 
>an IRQ with one of the Digium cards. This whole IRQ thing is driving me 
>crazy ... I disabled everything I could in BIOS and that freed up some 
>IRQs, but there's no way to assign a particular IRQ to a particular 
>device. I haven't had to think about IRQs in a long time, and it's very 
>frustrating. I'd still like to hear about hardware suggestions that 
>could avoid this or make this better in the future. Like, are there 
>motherboards that let you assign IRQ to devices?

Yipe. You gotta eliminate that RAID controller. A quick way to eliminate it
would be to yank out the controller, put in a random hard drive off of the
embedded IDE controller and install Asterisk at Home (that way you don't have
to recompile or reinstall the OS, it does it all for you, quickly). If you
try this I found that the new TDM driver included with a at h doesn't work for
jack. Use modprobe wcfxo instead, the old one. 

>Since I get echo and popping noises even when I'm dialing from one 
>extension to another (no Digium card involved), I'm guessing that the 
>problem is at least partly the telephones. Of course, the sound quality 
>is better in other ways (e.g. both sides of the line are clearer), so 
>maybe there are some problems with the Digium cards, too.

Double yipe. Things to look at here in this case include transcoding (i.e.
make sure that you are using the same codec end-to-end, for example all the
phones and Asterisk are using ULAW codec with allow=ulaw statements in
sip.conf and setting ulaw as the preferred codec in your phone setup) the
quality of your LAN (take your LAN out of the picture by cabling a couple of
phones DIRECTLY to the Asterisk server with a crossover cable; some phones
like Snom allow you to daisy chain multiple devices together) and even the
volume of the handset (a cranked handset volume can introduce echo into the
call path simply by the handset microphone picking up audio coming from the
handset speakers. Softphones are notorious for this when you use a crappy
headset or plain old mic and speakers)

Good luck and please keep posting so everyone can learn from your
experience.