[Asterisk-Users] zaptel PRI drivers

[Tom]

I have a quick question.
I know that running X on an asterisk server is not officially "supported",
however, I've never had any trouble with it until now (8 months, using wctdm
cards with fxo and fxs ports, IAX trunks, SIP phones, everything except a PRI
card).  Now I just installed my first asterisk box that terminates a PRI, and
bam, HDLC errors up the wazoo if X is running, if its not, everything is fine,
I assume this is because the timing parameters for the PRI are so much more
strick.

I don't mind if X is a little less responsive (even alot less responsive), but I
would really like to be able to run X on a server with a PRI.  Is there any way
to reduce X11's priority so that it doesn't interfere with the zaptel driver
for the PRI... I've tried renicing X as far down as I can and renicing Asterisk
up as far as I can, however I fear this won't ever fix the problem since I
think the actual kernel module that is running the pri card needs to get higher
priority (ie, the kernel itself needs higher priority).  Is there any way to do
this?  Am I correct in my analysis?  I really don't understand why on a system
that averages less than 3% CPU usage with X running, why it can't handle the
PRI.  I know for whatever reason X always gets a really high priority (although
top doesn't show X getting any special treatment its PR 15 NICE 0 by default,
lower than most other processes on the system).

Another idea is that right now the system is only a single proc, but it is dual
proc capable.  Would this somehow help if we added the second proc?  My
thinking is it won't because it's a kernel module we are dealing with, and
because of that I can't control the affinity of the driver (I was thinking at
one point put X11 on 1 proc and Asterisk on the second, but it's not Asterisk
that has the problem I don't think.)

My final idea is that currently the system has an onboard 8mb ati graphic card
that leaves almost all actual graphics processing to the CPU, could adding a
better graphics card possibly help X use less cpu and not get in the way so
much?

Anyway, I know this isn't a supported setup, so if thats your answer don't
bother replying, I'm know this will be a kludge/hack to get working (if I can
get it working at all).  I'm just trying to do something that will be
convienient for me and my users, there are other systems running on the server
that I don't want to manage through the CLI, and the users don't know how to
manage through the CLI, and there is no web management for them.

Does anyone have success running X on an asterisk box that terminates a PRI?
If so what hardware (video card, cpu, ram, mobo, etc)?

Thanks as I know this setup isn't supported, and I'm probably asking alot, don't
think I'm just relying on the list for bizarre things, I've been trying various
ways of doing this for the last 3 weeks, I can successfully run a vnc server on
the box (without X running) and everything works, so for whatever reason it is
getting a lower priority or something.  I really need to run GDM though as
managing VNC passwords/usernames/desktop settings is quite cumbersome and if we
can just get GDM running, we can use our ldap authentication server for logins
to this box (which is what we were doing previously when we didn't have a PRI
terminated on this box).

Thanks alot for any responses/help,
Tom Christensen