Thought I would post this experience to the list so it's archived for posterity... My company is deploying Asterisk-based PBX's to all of our branch offices. Each office has 2 analog Voice lines and a fax line. We didn't want to go to the expense of using TDM400's in the servers (which run asterisk and Hylafax) so we opted for 2 X100P cards in each box. So far they have worked fine at all but one office. The system at the office in question would work perfectly for an entire day once it was set up. The next morning, however, one of the 2 phone lines would appear to be dead and the X100P would be in Red alarm. Plugging a phone into the X100P's pass-through connection would show dial-tone on the line, and the phone worked perfectly. It was as if the X100p lost it's ability to see the audio on the line and nothing would revive it. Tried restarting the zaptel module, rebooting the server completely, complete power down, unplugging the phone line and even connecting up a phone line simulator and moving the card to another server. The card never works again. This went on for three days. Burned out an X100p every night. I called the telco (Verizon) and they sent out a couple of guys to run tests on the line, but found nothing. Their Demarc is properly grounded and has surge suppression modules attached, the cable that runs from their demarc to our punch-down block is in grounded metal conduit and does not run near any power source. The cable that runs from the punch-down block to the wall jack also does not run anywhere near anything electrical, and everything is twisted pair all the way from the wall jack to the demarc. To further eliminate the possibility of echo or other noise, I ran twisted pair carrying both voice lines from the wall jack to the server, approximately 3 feet in length. Now here is where things get interesting... That 3 foot cable run passes behind a 21" monitor that was connected to the server. When the line tests showed everything OK, I decided the monitor might be a long shot but I could understand how the degaussing coil coil could possibly induce a surge on the phone line if the monitor was somehow degaussing nightly, so I unplugged the monitor's power cable and left everything else as it was. So far so good. X100p #4 is still working this morning, so it looks like the problem is solved. Hope this helps someone else later on.
Thanks, Brent Davidson _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
