FOOD FOR THOUGHT PIAF-Green with Astribank

[john dawlish]

Before making my initial post as a PIAF newbie I did have a good look around the forum threads for up to date info on using the Xorcom Astribank and using an HFC-s ISDN2e card with mISDN and found nothing that seemed current.
Having looked at the mISDN WIKI there is nothing helpful there as there once used to be and similarly Xorcom seems to have dropped much of the useful info from its knowledge base.

Maybe I'm simply wasting my time trying to interface older hardware to PIAF green Asterisk 11, it does rather look as though no-one else is doing it. Nevertheless I will start from scratch with a fresh install (been there twice already) but with the hardware already installed/connected this time and see if there are any differences in what happens when attempting to install them after the PIAF install.

I know the Astribank will work on vanilla Asterisk 2.11 under Centos 6.3 because I had that working briefly a year or so ago albeit in a faulty *server. I did track the fault down in the end, the symptom was that the 180Gb hard drive filled to capacity about every 30 hours, the cause turned out to be a very slightly misaligned X100P card, which presented no issues itself and worked normally, but after multiple clean installs of Centos and Asterisk during troubleshooting I settled for a cut down version of *1.8 with a pair of X100P cards and external SIP FXS ATAs when I cleared the fault just to get the system up quickly.

I thought PIAF would be an interesting diversion but so far it is interesting in ways that I never expected. I expect that I'll learn more about linux than anything else before I either succeed or admit defeat.

 

[kenn10]

I have one of the original Astribank 8 units that I no longer use. Depending on your application, its simpler to go with a SIP based FXS arrangement like the SPA-8000 from Linksys/Cisco. I liked the idea of floating the FXS ports on the network where I needed them instead of having all the ports tied to the server via USB. For ISDN applications, there are many other options available to you. With the Astribank, every time I upgraded Asterisk and Centos versions, it was a nightmare trying to make the thing work again.

I believe you will find that Xorcom is not well supported with PIAF as there are some libraries and hooks needed to make their product work. Xorcom has their own hardware and Asterisk distribution now and has contributed little to the PIAF community in recent history.

 

[phonebuff]

John,

Can't help you with the Xorcom Astribank, but if you want ISDN in any form I would recommend talking with Mark at Red-fone in Miami.

Their products are the most stable I have ever worked with for ISDN, and the support is great.

http://red-fone.com/
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[john dawlish]

I have one of the original Astribank 8 units that I no longer use. Depending on your application, its simpler to go with a SIP based FXS arrangement like the SPA-8000 from Linksys/Cisco. I liked the idea of floating the FXS ports on the network where I needed them instead of having all the ports tied to the server via USB. For ISDN applications, there are many other options available to you. With the Astribank, every time I upgraded Asterisk and Centos versions, it was a nightmare trying to make the thing work again.

I believe you will find that Xorcom is not well supported with PIAF as there are some libraries and hooks needed to make their product work. Xorcom has their own hardware and Asterisk distribution now and has contributed little to the PIAF community in recent history.

My Astribank is a Mark 1 unit. Whether SIP is simpler is somewhat irrelevant, I have lots of SIP ATAs and SIP phones from various manufacturers. The point is that I retired in 2005 after spending 35 years in the communications industry and Asterisk is a hobby enabling me to connect my collection of telephones to other collectors and enthusiasts around the world using VOIP. The Astribank is a nice convenient unit enabling me to hook up 16 analogue phones directly to Asterisk. Unlike 99% of ATAs the Astribank accepts loop disconnect pulsing from dial telephones and it is an ideal fit for purpose unit. As I said I know that Astribank works with vanilla Asterisk 2.11 so it ought to work with PIAF green too. However, PIAF green seems to have the same issue that all relatively recent Asterisk sources have, i.e. the unit is recognised as a USB device but probably with an incorrect designation so Dahdi can't find it as there is an XPP loader file missing which was issued as a fix by Xorcom some years ago. So far I have been unable to locate the copy of the file that I had, it's on a Windows hard drive somewhere, and the Xorcom website seems to have deleted it, at least pointers in its knowledge base lead to 'not found' pages. Interestingly I note that there are similar broken links amongst the Astribank threads I have found in this forum.

Of the many devices that I have used with Asterisk in the past I would venture to suggest that an Astribank was the least likely to need support once up and running.

 

[john dawlish]

John,

Can't help you with the Xorcom Astribank, but if you want ISDN in any form I would recommend talking with Mark at Red-fone in Miami.

Their products are the most stable I have ever worked with for ISDN, and the support is great.

http://red-fone.com/
=======

I am not looking to buy hardware, I'd like to use what I have, Asterisk for me is a hobby. AFAIK mISDN is built into the latest kernels and has been for some time so I'm wondering why PIAF doesn't come with an Asterisk mISDN channel. Obviously something is missing which I thought was mISDN and mISDNuser, the only available versions of those seem to be version 2 but after downloading the sources and compiling them no trace of compiled code was to be found so mISDN init scan did nothing. After two clean installs and two attempts at that I'm scratching my head. I am not interested in using BRIstuff as that is incompatible with E1, ideally Id have E1, TDM400 and HFC-S cards in the three available PCI slots.

Amongst my collection I have several PBX systems, one of which has 4 BRI ports and 32 FXS ports which I'd like to hook up. For that I would possibly invest in a 4 port BRI card in the future but first I want to see an HFC-S card work with mISDN and an Asterisk mISDN driver. Despite ruling out BRIstuff I am aware that chan_mISDN is not the only remaining possibility, I am thinking of giving chan_lcr a chance if I can't get chan_mISDN to work.