asterisk users - Mar 2006 - Stability and motherboard questions with TE406P and TE410P

I am having a problem with asterisk not being stable enough for production
use.  I have two cards, the digium TE406P, and the TE410P.  The TE410P is
the primary card that I am using but I would like to move to the TE406P for
the echo cancellation and more flexibility of PCI slots available.

General config info:

3 PRIs, configured as such:

span=1,2,0,esf,b8zs
span=2,0,0,esf,b8zs
span=3,1,0,esf,b8zs
span=4,0,0,esf,b8zs

I have modified the 2 and 1 timing source declarations to several different
configurations but am unsure what the proper way to configure that is.  Is
my current setup correct?  Both span one and span three have timing on the
line from the carrier.

Rundown of issues seen with these cards:

TE410P:
- zttest will never report 100% for me across different motherboards
(Supermicro P8SCT, Dell 850)
- Crash/instability of about once per two weeks where I have to power cycle
the server, i.e. phone calls stop working and a reboot fixes it


TE406P:
- zttest runs flawlessly on this card, 100% across the board
- PRIs will go from up and working fine, to "Provisioned, Down,
Active"
after the server has been up for around 10 minutes, this may be related to
rxfax and txfax being installed?  Has anyone had an issue with this specific
card?  We have had this experience across multiple motherboards.

After working with two different cards and across multiple motherboards I am
starting to lose faith on the stability of the Asterisk platform, but I know
others are having lots of success.  My boss is looking for something that
says "With the TE406P, we have had zero issues on X motherboard", does
anyone have any recommendations?  Has anyone else had stability issues with
the digium 4 port cards?

Thanks,
Kyle
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Kyle Sexton wrote:
> TE410P:
> - zttest will never report 100% for me across different motherboards
> (Supermicro P8SCT, Dell 850)
> - Crash/instability of about once per two weeks where I have to power cycle
> the server, i.e. phone calls stop working and a reboot fixes it
> 
> 
> TE406P:
> - zttest runs flawlessly on this card, 100% across the board
> - PRIs will go from up and working fine, to "Provisioned, Down,
Active"
> after the server has been up for around 10 minutes, this may be related to
> rxfax and txfax being installed?  Has anyone had an issue with this
specific
> card?  We have had this experience across multiple motherboards.
> 
> After working with two different cards and across multiple motherboards I
am
> starting to lose faith on the stability of the Asterisk platform, but I
know
> others are having lots of success.  My boss is looking for something that
> says "With the TE406P, we have had zero issues on X motherboard",
does
> anyone have any recommendations?  Has anyone else had stability issues with
> the digium 4 port cards?
> 
Kyle,

While my reply probably doesn't help you any, I just want to say that
I've been
experiencing the same sort of problem. I've got a TE410P on a server with an
Intel SE7210TP1-E Entry level server motherboard; we're connecting the card
to
four Rhino T1 channel banks.

I'm also experiencing the random crash issue, albeit perhaps not as
frequent.
Some symptoms:

- server "hangs" and is generally bogged down. Even when I'm at
the console in
front of the server typing one key on the keyboard takes 4-5 seconds to get a 
response
- random noise, echo and badness starts to appear on the phones connected to the
channel banks. This is because something's eating up the CPU processing
power
and the server isn't able to service the 1k interrupts the zap card requires

One of the things I've had to do, as a jerry-rig type of fix is to have
Asterisk
restart every day at 3am. This has lengthened the duration in-between server 
crashes, but isn't really a good solution.

What we're going to do is to scrap the TE410 and use Sangoma's A104
card. In the
same installation, we've got a server (same _identical_ specs as the one
above)
with one A104 -- two incoming PRIs and two outgoing to an Avaya PABX. This one 
has not crashed since it went into production last august.

This is probably just a rant, but I thought you'd like to know that
you're not
the only one struggling with the TE410 cards.

Hope you'll be able to get your setup fixed soon, good luck.

Cheers,
Flynn