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

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Monday 22 August 2005 17:07, jennyw wrote:
> This is for an office -- I figured that running hardware RAID would be
> the most likely to avoid downtime if a hard drive failed. How do most
> people handle this?

Linux software RAID1.  Don't piss away your money on anything else.  Hell on a 
fileserving-only system I would think hard about pissing my money away on a 
hardware RAID5 system even.  Unless the server's got a bottleneck somewhere 
(and most times it's the damn network, not the hard drives or CPU), don't 
waste your money.

Besides, when your RAID card dies you're screwed unless you have another.  
With Linux software RAID you just plonk it into another system.  Between XFS, 
LVM and md (multiple device, the name for the software RAID implementation in 
Linux) I am as happy as a clam.

> The phone lines are wired to a patch panel (RJ45). Plugging in cheap
> analog phones work great -- they get very clear sound.

This tells me the "sharing network and TDM IRQs" is a bad thing.

I get away with it very well on my one asterisk box at home...  P3 
motherboard, VIA chipset, Intel network card, TDM400.  It's also an NFS 
server for my MythTV box so the network's always used...  for some odd reason 
that motherboard/nic combo just plain old works.  It's not standard.  :-)

> More on sound quality -- when making calls from one extension to
> another, the volume level is much, much better. However, we still get
> echo. So this might not be a problem with the Digium cards (or not only
> with the Digium cards). The clicking noises are intermittent -- they
> don't happen all the time. So the next thing to try might be to get
> better phones.

One extension to another with what, SIP phones, regular phones plugged into 
the TDM card, what?  Have you played around with the gains?  Again, no data, 
lots of anecdotal evidence.  Get some hard data.

-A.