I am so fed up with Digium cards. My company first owned a TE410P, I installed it in a Dell server and "enjoyed" its instability (we bought it months before Digium warned about the incompatibility issues). Then we switched to a TE411P for the hardware echo cancellation. Now we want to receive fax (< 20/day) on it and guess what ? Since April 2006 (again a few months after we bought our brand new card), "officially, fax communications is not supported with Digium cards" ( http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+fax ). Of course, I should have guessed that it is far too much to ask to a $2495 card ! Is the "fax" extension in Asterisk just there to push us to the competing products ? We hesitated to buy another Digium card after the problems with TE410P, but I told myself it was nice to support Asterisk by buying some Digium cards. Now Digium make us regret our buys and a disappointed customer is a lost customer forever... Too sad...
isamar@isamarmaia.org
2006-Apr-13 17:12 UTC
[Asterisk-Users] Digium cards, so disappointing !
Buy Sangoma. Good cards. Good support. On Fri, 14 Apr 2006, Tony ROBIN wrote:> > I am so fed up with Digium cards. My company first owned a TE410P, > I installed it in a Dell server and "enjoyed" its instability (we > bought it months before Digium warned about the incompatibility > issues). Then we switched to a TE411P for the hardware echo > cancellation. Now we want to receive fax (< 20/day) on it and > guess what ? Since April 2006 (again a few months after we bought > our brand new card), "officially, fax communications is not > supported with Digium cards" ( http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+fax ). > Of course, I should have guessed that it is far too much to ask > to a $2495 card ! Is the "fax" extension in Asterisk just there > to push us to the competing products ? > > We hesitated to buy another Digium card after the problems with > TE410P, but I told myself it was nice to support Asterisk by > buying some Digium cards. Now Digium make us regret our buys and > a disappointed customer is a lost customer forever... Too sad... > _______________________________________________ > --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- > > Asterisk-Users mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >
*shrugs* Ya win some ya lose some. We've spent about 10 grand plus on Digium cards and have been pretty satisfied with ours :) Faxes have been working great for over 6 months and the cards work wonderfully in our Dell servers. They just need more documentation on the different configuration options you can pass on load... I think the only problems we've really had are configuration related, or bad hardware on our part, oh, and a server room fry that took out more than just the Asterisk servers :-P Aaron On Fri, 14 Apr 2006, Tony ROBIN wrote:> > I am so fed up with Digium cards. My company first owned a TE410P, > I installed it in a Dell server and "enjoyed" its instability (we > bought it months before Digium warned about the incompatibility > issues). Then we switched to a TE411P for the hardware echo > cancellation. Now we want to receive fax (< 20/day) on it and > guess what ? Since April 2006 (again a few months after we bought > our brand new card), "officially, fax communications is not > supported with Digium cards" ( http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+fax ). > Of course, I should have guessed that it is far too much to ask > to a $2495 card ! Is the "fax" extension in Asterisk just there > to push us to the competing products ? > > We hesitated to buy another Digium card after the problems with > TE410P, but I told myself it was nice to support Asterisk by > buying some Digium cards. Now Digium make us regret our buys and > a disappointed customer is a lost customer forever... Too sad... > _______________________________________________ > --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- > > Asterisk-Users mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >-- Aaron Daniel Computer Systems Technician Sam Houston State University amdtech@shsu.edu (936) 294-4198
Tony ROBIN wrote:>Now we want to receive fax (< 20/day) on it and >guess what ? Since April 2006 (again a few months after we bought >our brand new card), "officially, fax communications is not >supported with Digium cards" ( http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+fax ). >Of course, I should have guessed that it is far too much to ask >to a $2495 card ! Is the "fax" extension in Asterisk just there >to push us to the competing products ? >If your zttest has good results (mostly 100%, nothing less than 99.98%) then you should be able to receive faxes (I'd suggest iaxmodem+HylaFAX) despite Digium's disclaimer. I do not excuse Digium, however, from sidelining fax the way that they have. Lee.
I must agree with you. I too buy Digium cards because I want to support the development of asterisk. Asterisk is a great product but digum cards are a pain, they say they don't support faxing but a lot of people that are implementing asterisk "demand" or "need" faxin as a day to day service on their PBX's. Sad to see that faxing is nearly impossible on digium cards. To me is like saying "here you have a great car but.. It cannot handle a car stereo" :( |-----Original Message----- |From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com |[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of |Tony ROBIN |Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2006 7:01 PM |To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com |Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Digium cards, so disappointing ! | | |I am so fed up with Digium cards. My company first owned a |TE410P, I installed it in a Dell server and "enjoyed" its |instability (we bought it months before Digium warned about |the incompatibility issues). Then we switched to a TE411P for |the hardware echo cancellation. Now we want to receive fax (< |20/day) on it and guess what ? Since April 2006 (again a few |months after we bought our brand new card), "officially, fax |communications is not supported with Digium cards" ( |http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+fax ). |Of course, I should have guessed that it is far too much to |ask to a $2495 card ! Is the "fax" extension in Asterisk just |there to push us to the competing products ? | |We hesitated to buy another Digium card after the problems |with TE410P, but I told myself it was nice to support Asterisk |by buying some Digium cards. Now Digium make us regret our |buys and a disappointed customer is a lost customer forever... |Too sad... |_______________________________________________ |--Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- | |Asterisk-Users mailing list |To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: | http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users |
I am using a digium TE110P and a TDM04b (or whatever the one with 4 FXS ports is called) on a Dell PowerEdge 2850. No problems at all with faxing with a cheap fax machine, though the asterisk box almost never goes above 5% CPU usage unless there are some conference calls going on. I can run modems/faxes just fine (though the modem connections seem to have a bit more latency than through a POTS line, it is acceptable for our use.) Just be sure to set echocancelwhenbridged=no and tweak your txgain and rxgain on the line (this is not a do it once and you're done thing, I had to go back probably 5 times over the course of 2 weeks to get the right numbers.) I am even doing a redirect to eFax (I'd do with asterisk but we already had an efax account and it works well enough) on one of my DIDs and it works great. Quite honestly I found a lot of documentation on how faxing in Asterisk is hard, and I just never saw that. Maybe I got lucky with a magic combination of hardware and forgiving fax machine, but it kind of just worked the first time I tried it. Now, if only setting up a 'page all' function on Cisco 79XX SIP phones without using a line appearance was so easy... -----Original Message----- From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Rich Adamson Sent: Friday, April 14, 2006 8:37 AM To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Digium cards, so disappointing ! Anton Krall wrote:> Problem is, how to make sure you system WILL have 100% on zttestbefore> buying the cards.. You need to have stability, compatibility andcertainty> that what you buy is going to work :( > > Anybody had similar problems or success stories with sangoma cards?Running zttest on my box with both a TDM04b and A200D installed indicates and average of 99.96% for both. Not sure how accurate that might be as the A200D card appears as a 24 channel interface in terms of /dev/zap even though only four ports are equipped. The TDM04b won't support faxes on this box under any circumstances and I've played around with about every possible pci latency, etc, change that folks have suggested in the last two years. Based on my heavily invested testing to date (which includes about two years of doing this), the "only" usable fax support thus far comes from using the A200D card with the fax machine directly connected to a fxs port on that card, and an fxo (pstn) port on the exact same card. Those fax tests have been 100% solid using a cheap/older Brother fax machine. _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Andrew, the only two patches are the ones you mention here?(spandsp and iaxmodem)? no other patches? Thanks, On 4/15/06, alist <alist@linuxsys.com> wrote:> I have complied the latest releases, patched with spandsp and iaxmodem > support. If you upgrade to the provided kernel you will have support for > the zaptel modules and sangoma drivers without the need to recomplie > anything. > > ftp://ftp.linuxsys.com/pub/LSE/packages/CentOS4/ > > Have fun... > > Andrew > _______________________________________________ > --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- > > Asterisk-Users mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >-- ------------------------------------------- Erick Perez Linux User 376588 http://counter.li.org/ (Get counted!!!) Panama, Republic of Panama
Doug Lytle wrote:> Steve Underwood wrote: > >> Doug Lytle wrote: >> >>> Nicholas Kathmann wrote: >> >> >> >> If you need to tweak gains something is seriously wrong. >> > The 2 fax machines that I was having problem with were failing to > train at 9600bps, they would then try at 7200 and finally train at > 4800. Around 15 pages into the fax they would fail with a, "Failed to > detect high speed-data carrier" and disconnect. Increasing the rxgain > to 3.0 and they now train at 9600bps and faxes complete.This is probably the reason why in iaxmodem-0.1.3 this was done: make V.29 rx more sensitive (spandsp) Lee.
Do you know if you can tweak gains if using unicall? I tried it once and if you move the gains on zaptel using a te110p with unicall on E1, when gains are +2 or -1, calls do not complete, forget even about faxing :) |-----Original Message----- |From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com |[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of |Doug Lytle |Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 10:18 AM |To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion |Subject: Re: Faxing and PCI (was Re: [Asterisk-Users] Digium cards, | |Steve Underwood wrote: |> Doug Lytle wrote: |> |>> Nicholas Kathmann wrote: |> |> |> If you need to tweak gains something is seriously wrong. |> |The 2 fax machines that I was having problem with were failing |to train at 9600bps, they would then try at 7200 and finally |train at 4800. |Around 15 pages into the fax they would fail with a, "Failed |to detect high speed-data carrier" and disconnect. Increasing |the rxgain to 3.0 and they now train at 9600bps and faxes complete. | |This PRI is connected to our Definity G3. | |Doug | |_______________________________________________ |--Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- | |Asterisk-Users mailing list |To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: | http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users | |
Steve Underwood
2006-Apr-18 18:09 UTC
Faxing and PCI (was Re: [Asterisk-Users] Digium cards,
Hi Anton, If you need to tweak gains for FAXing, something is badly wrong. The modems operate over a wide range of signal levels. Steve Anton Krall wrote:>Do you know if you can tweak gains if using unicall? I tried it once and if >you move the gains on zaptel using a te110p with unicall on E1, when gains >are +2 or -1, calls do not complete, forget even about faxing :) > > > >|-----Original Message----- >|From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com >|[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of >|Doug Lytle >|Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 10:18 AM >|To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion >|Subject: Re: Faxing and PCI (was Re: [Asterisk-Users] Digium cards, >| >|Steve Underwood wrote: >|> Doug Lytle wrote: >|> >|>> Nicholas Kathmann wrote: >|> >|> >|> If you need to tweak gains something is seriously wrong. >|> >|The 2 fax machines that I was having problem with were failing >|to train at 9600bps, they would then try at 7200 and finally >|train at 4800. >|Around 15 pages into the fax they would fail with a, "Failed >|to detect high speed-data carrier" and disconnect. Increasing >|the rxgain to 3.0 and they now train at 9600bps and faxes complete. >| >|This PRI is connected to our Definity G3. >| >|Doug > >
Our production asterisk server has TE411P and we route close to 50-70K of calls per month through its ports. We have NEVER EVER had any issues with faxing (close to 3k/month) with faxes connected on one of the spans of the card. Moreover, we have had quite a success receiving the faxes with iaxmodem+hylafax thanks to Lee Howard that we're now gradually switching the fax machines to iaxmodem+hylafax combo. Faxes are sensitive to timing and configuration settings of your asterisk. Once your system is "tuned to perfection" you should have no problems faxing at all despite the official stance from Digium.> issues). Then we switched to a TE411P for the hardware echo > cancellation. Now we want to receive fax (< 20/day) on it and > guess what ? Since April 2006 (again a few months after we bought > our brand new card), "officially, fax communications is not > supported with Digium cards" (http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+fax
Opened pseudo zap interface, measuring accuracy... 99.987793% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 99.987793% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 99.987793% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 99.987793% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 99.987793% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 99.987793% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 99.987793% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 99.987793% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 99.987793% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% 100.000000% --- Results after 111 passes --- Best: 100.000000 -- Worst: 99.987793 -- Average: 99.999015 Server Specs: Asus P5WD2 Premium Pentium D 830 (Dual Core) Corsair DDR2-6400 2GB RAM (4 pices) 2xSATA2 RAID (linux software mirroring) TE406P (not TE411P as I stated before) Running debian with non-debian kernel (stock standard 2.6.15.4, email if you want .config ) Some anomalies have been observed during the testing of the server before implementing it into production. 1 - The server performed MUCH better with software RAID one then hardware, not so mention it was easier to setup. 2 - DDR2-6400 improved some of the benchmarks over DDR2-5200. My understanding that all samples that come in and out if Digium card are copied to user space so faster ram should be of benefit to the system. The system has not been restarted from December. Only asterisk was upgraded 3-4 times since December. Before unloading zaptel drivers we checked for IRQ misses with zttool (before each unload/load of drivers) and since December we had none. The system is now running realtime (mysql on the same machine), iaxmodem+hylafax combo for receiving faxes. I must say, spending just a little extra to get good hardware pays off in the long run. If you have any questions, email. Boris> -----Original Message-----> From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-users-> bounces@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Anton Krall> Sent: Friday, 21 April 2006 14:27> To: 'Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion'> Subject: RE: [Asterisk-Users] Digium cards, so disappointing !>> Can you send the output of zttest ? Whats your average and what kindof> hardware are you using?>> That will give people pointers of what to use/expect.>>-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20060430/05879769/attachment.htm
On Sunday 30 April 2006 10:27, Boris Bakchiev wrote:> Opened pseudo zap interface, measuring accuracy...This may be a stupid question but how did you do this? -- Cheers Wayne
On 5/2/06, Wayne Gemmell <waynetg@telkomsa.net> wrote:> > Opened pseudo zap interface, measuring accuracy... > This may be a stupid question but how did you do this?in your zaptel source dir (after making..): ./zttest -v or search for zttest on voip-info. cheers