ZAPHFC

Note: Using bristuff breaks PRI support, so you cant have both bri and pri in the same server.
However a user reports: "We are using Asterisk 1.0.7-BRIstuffed-0.2.0-RC8a with a Digium PRI card an a beroNet quadBRI
in one server and it's running perfecty for months. It depends only on the order the modules are loaded
(/sbin/modprobe zaptel, insmod qozap.ko, insmod wcte11xp.ko - in this order)."

If compared to a CAPI driven card a hfc-pci card provides your box with NT mode, zaptel timing and echo cancelation.

Recent versions:

• bristuff-0.3.0-PRE-1y-e is the current version for Asterisk 1.2
• bristuff-0.2.0-RC8r is the stable/old version for Asterisk 1.0.x.
• zaphfc_0.3.0-PRE-1o_florz-12 Is the latest version of the florz patch

Note Junghanns do NOT keep links on the front page up to date ... always check the downloads directory for the latest versions.

Caller-ID

(I believe that this is solved on bristuff 0.3.0-PRE1o. Can anybody please update the page? Tzafrir)

If you experience problems forwarding the incoming caller-id to internal phones, you probably forgot setting callerid=asreceived in your zapata.conf. Otherwise, add a SetCIDNum in your dialplan,i.e.

The above example, assigns the network provided callerid to the internal Caller ID field. A Zero is prefixed as it is nescessary for dialing out.

Meanwhile, there are one fork and one patch improving the driver in several ways:

• The patch from Florian Zumbiehl:
  • Interrupt loss tolerant b channel handling (see below).
  • Support for the slave mode of the chip, enabling the cards to run completely in sync.
  • "Interrupt bundling" greatly reduces the driver's CPU usage with several cards in the system.
• The fork from Daniele Orlandi:
  • not maintained anymore; instead see Asterisk vISDN
  • Interrupt loss tolerant b channel handling (see below).
  • Sniffing capability, so you can examine ISDN packets using a patched ethereal.

They have been created independently and both improve the b channel handling to be more tolerant to lost/delayed interrupts (which is a big problem with the original driver if you have more than one card, a card sharing interrupts, or any major concurrent load on the system). The other improvements are quite different, though, which is why they are both listed here for you to choose. They might be merged someday, but until then you will have to choose one of them.

For hfc install instructions see:

• http://updates.xorcom.com/astribank/bristuff/1.4/INSTALL.html

Setting up hfc cards for NT mode:

Q: Do I need to use a special kind of wire, is a NT1 (also called ntba or network termination device) needed for termination / powersupply between the card and a phone?

A: It depends. If the device(s) you want to connect have their own power supply, such as PBXes, you usually won't need an NT1 for power supply. Otherwise, use an hfc-s based card that does power the line (usually with an external power supply such as BNPW1). With an another card, just follow the documentation at http://isdn.jolly.de/ to wire up your card, your NT1 and your phone equipment. Of course, you always need termination - which can be done without the need for an NT1, though.


To load the card in NT1 mode you'll need to set the 'modes' option when loading the driver:

  insmod ./zaphfc.o modes=1

or if you have more cards (example: two) you can use
  
  insmod ./zaphfc.o modes=1  #(binary: 0 1)  card0: NT mode, card1: TE mode
or
  insmod ./zaphfc.o modes=2  #(binary: 1 0)  card0: TE mode, card1: NT mode
or
  insmod ./zaphfc.o modes=3  #(binary: 1 1)  card0: NT mode, card1: NT mode
and so on

Note that when using more than one card, the module will segfault when unloading:



... and you'll be stuck with a half removed module. The only cure I've found thus far is rebooting.

Use this patch to fix the problem (this problem is fixed in bristuff-0.2.0-RC5!):


When configuring zaptel, you'll need to load the zaphfc driver before any wcfxs or wcfxo drivers, as the zaphfc channels are loaded as a span.

All in all, the driver is 'sort of' working, 'sometimes'. I have dialtone disappearing from the ISDN phones regularly, only a restart of asterisk brings it back. To be fair, the configuration of this setup has not had any real priority, and no real debugging has been done.

when picking up the handset on one of the phones, I allways get the following message in the console:

  Feb 17 21:02:07 WARNING147466: chan_zap.c:5954 zt_pri_error: PRI: XXX
  Missing mandatory IE 24/Channel Identification XXX

the configs

If you only have one hfc card it should be enough to change
  signalling = bri_cpe_ptmp
to
  signalling = bri_net_ptmp
in your /etc/asterisk/zapata.conf file

If you have two hfc cards you will have to do some more configuration.

add the following lines into /etc/zaptel.conf

Then execute
  ztcfg

You can double check by doing to get a verbose output:
  ztcfg -vv

The result should look somewhat like the following:

In your /etc/asterisk/zapata.conf set

The meaning of the above keywords is very well explained in Asterisk config zapata.conf.

For the UK .. BT circuits on ISDN2E (probably all ISDN circuits) you MUST set:



Failing to set this will result in errors of "PRI: received SETUP message for a call that is not a new call " and messages related to "unable to transfer audio" .. examing PRI debug with 'intense' (pri intense debug span 1 on the CLI) will reveal an error related to "unallocated number" before the call is dropped. "unknown" works as a pridialplan setting "local" and others do not.

Note: Unlike in chan_capi you cannot set a filter in the .conf files to listen on specific MSNs and ignore calls to other MSNs on the same S0 bus. Instead you need to use contexts (like "from-bri" above).
Note: For CLIR (to hide your outgoing Caller ID Number) you'll need to use SetCallerPres in the dialplan.

Stability checks

• I have now got this little ditty running to keep an eye on it:

 while true; do grep "(F" /proc/zaptel/2; sleep .1; done

Typical values are F4, F6 (DEACTIVATED) and of F7 (ACTIVATED)

• On the CLI: pri show span 1
• less /var/log/messages | grep zaphfc

zaphfc warnings in syslog and Frank Gockel's patch

If you find messages like these in your syslog:

maybe Frank Gockels patch is for you. You can find a detailed discussion here: http://www.ip-phone-forum.de/showthread.php?t=113781

Frank gockel programmed a patch for zaphfc which tries to recover lost interrupts. At the beginning, my syslog was full of these messages but after applying the patch, everything is OK. No such message for half a year and good sound quality.

You can find a description of the patch (in german) at http://home.arcor.de/frank.gockel/software/zaphfc/zaphfc.diff.txt.

Homepage of this wonderful patch: http://home.arcor.de/frank.gockel/software/zaphfc/

Problem with ZapHFC with ISDN BRI HFC cards and signalization (busy etc.)

• edit /etc/asterisk/zapata.conf and insert the line for correct ISDN signalization:

priindication=outofband

Common compile error

If you have something like this :
/usr/src/bristuff-0.2.0-RC8o/zaphfc/zaphfc.c:396: error: structure has no member named `bytes2transmit'
/usr/src/bristuff-0.2.0-RC8o/zaphfc/zaphfc.c:419: error: structure has no member named `bytes2transmit'
/usr/src/bristuff-0.2.0-RC8o/zaphfc/zaphfc.c:436: error: structure has no member named `eoftx'

It's because zaptel was not patched correctly. Maybe you don't have patch (debian : apt-get install patch).
You can try this :
cd bristuff-0.3.0-PRE-1p/zaptel-1.2.5
patch -p1 < ../patches/zaptel.patch

Finding cards - where and what to buy

You're looking for a 'Cologne HFC' card. The Cologne chips are used by different manufacturers at the low end of the market. That's fine as you're going to throw the cheap Windows drivers and software away anyay! In the UK, there are very few cards for sale due to the RoHS legislation - some manufacturers just stopped making the cards rather than spend money making them compliant. Have a look on eBay though as there are still some old, non-RoHS cards out there, as well as new ones!

See also

• Asterisk @ home and Hfc by donDisperato
• Asterisk zttool: How to obtain the ZAP channel status
• General ISDN BRI tutorial

Other ISDN BRI channels in Asterisk:

• Asterisk CAPI channels is another out-of-tree module. Relies on the CAPI2.0 krnel interface
• Asterisk mISDN channels in the tree, but currently unstable. Relies on CAPI2.0 as well
• Asterisk modem channels used the old ISDN4Linux interface. Deprecated as of Asterisk 1.2
• Asterisk vISDN: New EuroISDN channel driver for HFC chipsets. no zaptel needed.

---

Go back to Asterisk zaptelBRI