[Asterisk-Users] Eicon DIVA PCI ISDN cards (not server) work with asterisk!

[Marc SCHAEFER]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 05:36:35PM +0200, Mark Elkins wrote:
> I am still curious. Which Driver do you use for the HFC card?

I manage my own Debian package repository for Debian stable (woody)
backports of asterisk and related stuff (based somewhat on
backports.org).

I currently use:
   Version: 1:1.0.6-0.bristuff_0.2.0_RC7k.cril.0

so it's about the same (I just have a few additional patches).

> It could be: bristuff-0.2.0-RC7k stuff from http://www.junghanns.net/  -
> but this locks you into using a particular - non-HEAD version of
> Asterisk.. (and missing all the new goodies)

not really, AFAIK the last time I tried, the BRI patches apply cleanly
also to more recent versions.

And 1.0.6 works quite well for me. The only problem I still have with
1.0.6 is that for some reason, IAXcomm user tell me that when they get a
call, and answer it, then after 30 seconds or 1 minute a new call comes
in (which is fake) and you have to cancel it in IAXcomm to get the first
call correctly.

I haven't debugged it yet.

I have SIP phones, IAX2 connections to remote Asterisk, ISDN
bidirectionnal gateway, analog TDM board with el cheapo analog tel,
DECT CLIP-compatible phone (works), and also ISDN local phones (using
HFC NT mode).

> I wish there were single, four and eight port ISDN BRI cards that Digium sold
> and supported - so I could run whichever version of Asterisk I wanted...

ISDN was never popular in the US for BRI lines. In Europe we even do
stupid things such as multiple-BRI operated in cascade (e.g. 4 BRIs,
giving you the equivalent of 8 communication channels), where it would
be more intelligent to use (partial) E1 for that purpose. I think
Germany has those partial E1 available to the public.

In the US, people usually do analog upto 10 lines and then get a T1.
As analog lines include caller ID (however AFAIK no easy ability to
*set* outgoing caller ID nor real calle*d* ID, without distinctive
ringing), most benefits of BRI ISDN are unneeded.

That's why most BRI ISDN development is done in Europe -- or more
precizely looks like it's Germany, really.

An alternative to zaptel is to use the m_isdn implementation of the
Linux kernel.

As I use 2.4 and it works very well with zaptel/zaphfc, I didn't bother
to try the 2.6 (crappy) kernels or the 2.4-m_isdn backport yet.