New Asterisk Box

About six months ago I built an Asterisk box for my home network. It allowed my to manage the phones around my house much better and to give a little more control as to what rings where and when. Everything more or less worked ok, but I had built it on my main file server and due to a motherboard issue the Openvox A800P card I had would occasionally have interrupt issues and make the calls choppy. I was able to correct most of these issues by not using the FXS daughter cards on the A800P by using a Cisco/Linksys PAP2T phone adapter, but still could generate problems with large amounts of disk activity which on a file server happen quite often. Additionally, I wanted to make the phone server to be separate from the file server.

After looking around I found an ideal box for my new server. Jetway offers a tiny Intel Atom based server the JBC110C96-525-B which has just enough room to fit the A800P card into it, which was a concern. Actually, getting the card into the machine was kinda tricky and I was concerned I was going to break it. The machine was cheap (< $200 from NewEgg) considering it reports itself as a 4 core 1.8 Ghz processor (I'm sure two are hyperthreaded) and with 2GB of RAM in it, runs very nice. I had a spare 160GB laptop SATA hard drive that I used as the primary storage. You really only need about 20GB for a PBX in a Flash (PIAF) install, and even that is overkill. Tempting to run it off a flash drive.

My experience with PIAF has been hit and miss. I like that everything pretty much works as they say it does. However, I don't like that they don't bother to package all the customizations as RPMS like the base system. To me it would be a big win if they bothered to do that. I also needed to patch the dahdi drivers to support the A800P card. Which if I had not done it before would have been much more difficult. I'm not sure why PIAF can't just provide these drivers in the base install.

Second FreePBX the web management interface to Asterisk has some real problems. I could not get it to configure my outgoing calls to go the way I wanted them, so I actually ended up removing the FreePBX generated configuration files and ended up using my own from the last server. I'm sure I'm losing some features by doing this, but the frustration of making it work drove me nuts. Probably some of this had to do with me not understanding the software that well, but it appeared to me that I had configured it correctly.

All in all the hardware is great, cheap, and dead quiet. The box has plenty of power to handle multiple calls. I've very positive it could scale to at least 10 with no problem, and probably 25 to 30. If I could get a pair of 1.5TB 2.5" SATA drives that were cheap and reliable (seems to be some issues with the quality of these drives at the moment) I would be very tempted to replace my big file server with one of these boxes.

All in all, I'm happy with the hardware I chose, not as much with the software, but there doesn't seem to be any better option at this point.

Asterisk in Operation

In my last post I talked about how I got the Openvox A800P card. I found that the card was sharing an interrupt with one of the SATA controllers in the machine. The card would work fine, until the disks on that controller were accessed. So I ended up pulling the card and moving it to a new slot so that it did not share an interrupt. This helped with the majority of the clicking I was getting on the card. But I still had some problems with echoing when I talked on the line. The echo problem was solved by running 'fxotune'. After running this tool the audio quality really improved.

I still get a few clicks every now and then, that I believe are related to the PCI bus. I talked to the Openvox support people and they recommend trying a new motherboard. This is not something I have handy at the moment, so I'll wait on that. I do think that going to pure VoIP phones will help with some of the noise. The VoIP adapter I bought has some of the clearest calls.

Being able to tweak the Asterisk dial plans has really been interesting. It is actually a little trickier that I expected, but once you get the concepts down it becomes a little clearer how to really make it work smoothly.

New FXS/FXO Card

Well the initial experiments with the X100P card (single line) went well. The card itself was a little flaky, but the overall concept looked good. So I decided to take the plunge and get a real TDM card. I decided on the OpenVox A800P card. This card is a knock off of the Digicom TDM800P, but at 1/3 the cost. I got the card with 2 FXS and 3 FXO daughter-cards. This well allow me to reuse all the phones in the house and several other devices without change and also allow me to run 3 outgoing lines. The card is large and requires a power connector (due to the FXS options). I actually had a hard time getting it into my PC case. Especially with the 3 hard drives I have in that machine. I have a total of 5 drives connected to the machine, so I may need to rethink that layout in the future.

Anyway, again getting the card installed and working was tricker than expected. I followed the instructions on the OpenVox website on how to get the drivers working. They didn't even compile, but it was due to a kernel issue. So I made a minor patch to the OpenVox drivers and then it compiled. Again the dahdi-tools had trouble with the card. I had to force some of the things to work. Hopefully, when I reboot the machine next time it all just comes up. I would think that the hardware drivers would be better than this.

I setup asterisk and I've made a couple of outgoing calls, the call quality seems ok so far. I'll have to test it on a longer call next week to ensure it doesn't drop, this is a problem the X100P card had.

Asterisk PBX - Adventures in building a home PBX

We have a lot of phone lines here that are really a mess to manage. So I've been experimenting with Asterisk. Luckily Fedora has Asterisk in its repository. So I decided to take the plunge and try it out.

The first thing I wanted to do, was to get basic callout working. I found tollfreegateway.com and setup their sip server so I could make US tollfree calls from my Asterisk server. I used Linphone and Ekiga on my desktop to connect to the Asterisk server. Setting up accounts on the Asterisk server was harder than expected due to trying to use one of the guis and all of them having particular limitation. I eventually dumped the GUIs and just modified the .conf files. I got my desktop connected to the local Asterisk server and then called a 877 number. It actually worked. So I had the proof of concept working.

The next step was to get callin working. As I already have several phone lines, I didn't want to add another line via SIP so I looked into an FXO device. These devices allow you to plug a standard phone line into the Asterisk server and have the server accept the calls. I wanted to be cheap about it, so I got a X100P adapter off eBay. I Figured $20 was not bad for a test. I installed the card in my server and for some reason the drivers would not find it. I found that the card required that it have its own interrupt.. geesh, I thought we were done with dealing with interrupts when the ISA bus died. Anyway, I disable the parallel, serial and firewire ports as I don't use them anyway and after that the card drivers started loading correctly. I have simplified this alot, I spent several hours getting this stuff to work and a lot of missteps so far. Challenging but fun at the same time.

Once the drivers were working, I had to configure Asterisk to respond to incoming calls. So I following the directions for editing the extensions.conf file and then I called the system and got prompt to select an extension. I dialed on and my desktop rang. I then setup the dial rules to call the extension I wanted and it worked automatically.

The next step is to get a OpenVox A800P card and configure all my incoming lines properly and make the system work the way I want it to. At $200 for the device it is a significant cost to make this work for a project. But it should make things work better. I also have purchased a couple ATA devices a Linksys SPA1001 and a Linksys PAP2  for adding phone extensions around the house. The one SPA1001 device works great so far. So I might pick up a few more on eBay.

So more to come with adventures in home PBX...