I'm glad everything went well finally Keith. The most important question though: is the boss happy?
I would be in for the extra card running around, again, if there enough users, say 5 or so. -Bill Ensley www.bearprinting.com On 5/8/2012 10:40 AM, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > I've got the Sangoma B600D analog telephone interface card working > with Asterisk. Yay! > > The B600D was $542+shipping from TelephonyWare in Concord California. > It performs signficantly better than the eBay "ChinaRoby" card it > replaced. The B600D ( 4*FXO connections to telco, 1*FXS connection > to deskset or fax ) has digital hardware echo cancellation. The > B600D comes with a 30 day "no questions asked" return policy, and > a five year warranty. They also have real live humans answering > their support email, like the fellow who composed a one page > response to the three support questions I asked. > > One unadvertised coolness is that the 2 double FXO jacks light up > with red LEDs, and the FXS with a green LED. If your phone server > is stuffed into a dark corner, this makes it much easier to plug > the right cords into the right jacks. Since connecting an FXS jack > to a telco jack (also FXS) zaps the card, this is a Good Thing. > > One advertised so-so feature are the two split cables in the box, > which can connect the two 2*FXO jacks on the card to four single > telco jacks. The cables are only 6 feet long, too short without > extenders, and a lot of wires to deal with. I built my own cable, > starting with 10 feet of CAT6 and crimping two four-wire RJ11s on > one end and four two-wire RJ11s on the other. Much less messy, > and no extra connection blocks in between. > > You might think that a lightly loaded dual core Pentium with the > highly-regarded OSLEC driver ought to be able to do software echo > cancellation for a cheap card, but we've had no end of trouble > with strangely sounding calls, especially connecting to cell > phones. The Sangoma folks understand echo cancellation, which is > why customers pay $$$ for their products. The echo cancellation > firmware for the FPGA on the card is closed source (sigh), but > all their drivers and setup software is open source, built from > source tar files. > > Install note: The Sangoma "wanpipe" software expects to modify > the dahdi driver and associated configurations. The "./Setup" > command in the wanpipe source directory does all the work, > including installing the rc.d files on redhat-derived systems > (probably also for debian-derived). It ignores the fxotune (line > and card calibration) information for other cards; however, it > does overwrite the /etc/asterisk/chan_dahdi.conf file, losing > the extent and group information. While ./Setup saves the old > file as /etc/asterisk/chan_dahdi.conf.bak, you may lose that > if you ./Setup twice. I prefer to "cp -a" old file versions > to [filename].YYYYMMDD[what_it_did] , and I do have backups of > them, but still, I would prefer that the install software was > smarter about preserving prior information. After repairing > the file, I did a "chattr +i chan_dahdi.conf" so it won't be > overwritten again. > > If you want a professional quality connection between Asterisk > and four inbound telco lines, this is a great card. If enough > of us get these cards, I propose that we pool some money and > purchase one local spare, which we can immediately substitute > for a failed card until Sangoma replaces it under the 5 year > warranty. Cross-border shipping to Toronto might be slow. > > Thanks to Bill Ensley for suggesting Sangoma, and the others > who've helped me with suggestions and deployment. Next, I > learn how to set up the programmable buttons and lamp fields > on the Aastra phones I bought. > > Keith > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
