i've just lost $2000 dollars or so on my first commercial asterisk installation .. i'm running a PIV class server, three Digium Wildcard FXO cards, and 10 Grandstream Budgettone SIP phones. The system was to be a PBX for a small company. After over 2 months of pissing about, the client has had his fill of asterisk problems, and asked me to take my equipment out of the building. Obviously, I haven't been paid for anything.
The problems I faced were the following : - initially a problem with asterisk crashing totally when there wasn't an extension to ring .. though this was fixed in a subsequent CVS, it was causing downtime. the client has no unix knowledge, and a script I put in to kick in the asterisk when it shut itself down didn't seem to always work. it also reduced the quality of my subsequent callout requests to something on the lines of "the phone server is crashed again" regardless of what the problem was - a dialplan problem, where one phone was ringing 10 seconds after the others, at the client's request and they were hearing other phones ring and picking up a non-ringing phone (ok, I can't really blame that on asterisk ..) - echo on the lines .. that after much fiddling around with configurations went from terrible to borderline acceptable. To people not used to digital telephony and computer stuff, the echo was VERY annoying. They used to avoid the phones because they said people would not understand them. - no consultative transfer. The closest I got was to park the call, call the other party, tell him "a voce" which line the call is parked on and then get him to pick up the call. This is, in my opinion, a very basic feature that is missing on asterisk. The park/ pick up sequence proved too difficult for the clients' secretaries to grasp. - I could not get G729 working properly (license paid up, G729 up and running). In the absence of a manual, the fault solving process was something like "ask a question on the mailing list, get a few answers, go to the client, try it out, fail, go back home, send another question on the mailinglist" with about 48 hours for each iteration. I was also appearing a real chimp "expermimenting" stuff at the clients' office. At this point I decided to cut my losses, retreive the equipment and call it a day. When asterisk is well documented and released in stable releases, I will willingly consider it again. I would be willing to pay for a stable, documented version of asterisk. It is a lovely software, and to begin with I was very enthusiastic about it. I do understand that the support community is helpful, but the current status of things limits asterisk to a hobbyist scenario or at least somewhere where there is an engineer with lots of linux experience and patience online 24 hours to solve problems as they crop up. If anyone would like a couple of second hand FXO boards, contact me. I have already found a home for the grandstreams. cheers Dave _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
