Re: [asterisk-users] A stupid problem with Playback

2023-05-28 Thread Steve Edwards

On Sun, 28 May 2023, Steve Matzura wrote:

It's probably eight or nine years old now, an ASRock motherboard with I 
don't even know what on it in the way of processor speed or power. I 
should probably pick up another machine but I can't justify the expense 
because it's only for play, FTP, and running this Asterisk project, 
which is complete enough now that I don't have to mess with it any more. 
Who knows--it might even wind up on a spare Raspberry Pi 4, in which 
case this whole tower can just go away.


A '4 is probably way more than you need. A Pi Zero W or a Pi Zero 2 W 
would probably do. ($15 plus case and spare USB wall wart.)


You may be able to justify the expense just on power savings. (Electricity 
in San Diego is $0.51/kWh.)


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https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-edwards-4244281

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Re: [asterisk-users] A stupid problem with Playback

2023-05-28 Thread asterisk

On 5/28/2023 11:51 AM, Steve Matzura wrote:

On 5/28/2023 6:19 AM, aster...@phreaknet.org wrote:


A great reason to avoid Asterisk packages and compile from source 
instead. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.


That's how I started, by trying to build version 18 from source. It 
failed. Colossally. The compile of sources would run for a while, 
then the machine would crash spectacularly--I mean, not just hang or 
reboot. It actually turned itself off. I tried it several times, and 
each time it failed in the same way, but at a different spot in the 
compile process. If ever I could figure out a way to trace that one 
down, I would. It was the strangest thing.


This sounds like your machine is defective in some major way. 
Granted, compiling software is pretty intensive, but your machine 
shouldn't just crash. I would try to figure that out. Is this a VM / 
bare metal? Have you tried this on another machine?


It's probably eight or nine years old now, an ASRock motherboard with 
I don't even know what on it in the way of processor speed or power.

It's not a manufacturer with which I'm familiar, either.
8 or 9 years isn't really that old. I run Asterisk on OptiPlex towers 
that are 20 years old, and it works really well. I've actually had more 
issues with things that are more compact, like rack servers. What's 
important is to have a working, compatible machine in good condition.


Some general observations:
- The CPU doesn't need to great, but it should be sufficient. Any 
desktop CPU from the last 20 years should be perfectly adequate.
- Compiling can run into hitches if you don't have enough memory on your 
machine. On machines with 1 GB of RAM or less, for example, I've found 
that swap space is mandatory to compile very large files (e.g. 
chan_sip.c). Otherwise, gcc will just get killed by the kernel 
eventually. But you need far more memory when compiling than when 
Asterisk itself is running. You could allocate a bunch of swap and 
deallocate it after you're done.


I should probably pick up another machine but I can't justify the 
expense because it's only for play, FTP, and running this Asterisk 
project, which is complete enough now that I don't have to mess with 
it any more. Who knows--it might even wind up on a spare Raspberry Pi 
4, in which case this whole tower can just go away.
For just SIP stuff, lots of people have used Pis and it works great for 
them, so that might not be a bad idea.
You definitely don't need a new machine though. Any old PC lying around 
since ~2000 or so will probably do just fine. If you happen to have a 
spare handy, you could try it out.


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Re: [asterisk-users] A stupid problem with Playback

2023-05-28 Thread Steve Matzura


On 5/28/2023 6:19 AM, aster...@phreaknet.org wrote:




A great reason to avoid Asterisk packages and compile from source 
instead. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.


That's how I started, by trying to build version 18 from source. It 
failed. Colossally. The compile of sources would run for a while, 
then the machine would crash spectacularly--I mean, not just hang or 
reboot. It actually turned itself off. I tried it several times, and 
each time it failed in the same way, but at a different spot in the 
compile process. If ever I could figure out a way to trace that one 
down, I would. It was the strangest thing.


This sounds like your machine is defective in some major way. Granted, 
compiling software is pretty intensive, but your machine shouldn't 
just crash. I would try to figure that out. Is this a VM / bare metal? 
Have you tried this on another machine?



It's probably eight or nine years old now, an ASRock motherboard with I 
don't even know what on it in the way of processor speed or power. I 
should probably pick up another machine but I can't justify the expense 
because it's only for play, FTP, and running this Asterisk project, 
which is complete enough now that I don't have to mess with it any more. 
Who knows--it might even wind up on a spare Raspberry Pi 4, in which 
case this whole tower can just go away.




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Re: [asterisk-users] A stupid problem with Playback

2023-05-28 Thread asterisk

On 5/27/2023 3:37 PM, Steve Matzura wrote:

On 5/27/2023 11:40 AM, aster...@phreaknet.org wrote:


Relative paths are relative to your language-specific directory.

Ya know, that's the one thing I didn't do was test Playback before 
copying the sound files out of /usr/share/asterisk/sounds/en_us into 
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds--I don't even know for sure that hello-world 
was playing from the /var path and not the /usr path. Good idea to 
test that and see what's really going on. I think I set too much store 
by these books sometimes. But when that's all I have, I tend to go 
with what I know, and if the book is all I know ... well ...


A great reason to avoid Asterisk packages and compile from source 
instead. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.


That's how I started, by trying to build version 18 from source. It 
failed. Colossally. The compile of sources would run for a while, then 
the machine would crash spectacularly--I mean, not just hang or 
reboot. It actually turned itself off. I tried it several times, and 
each time it failed in the same way, but at a different spot in the 
compile process. If ever I could figure out a way to trace that one 
down, I would. It was the strangest thing.


This sounds like your machine is defective in some major way. Granted, 
compiling software is pretty intensive, but your machine shouldn't just 
crash. I would try to figure that out. Is this a VM / bare metal? Have 
you tried this on another machine?


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Re: [asterisk-users] A stupid problem with Playback

2023-05-27 Thread Steve Matzura


On 5/27/2023 11:40 AM, aster...@phreaknet.org wrote:


Relative paths are relative to your language-specific directory.

Ya know, that's the one thing I didn't do was test Playback before 
copying the sound files out of /usr/share/asterisk/sounds/en_us into 
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds--I don't even know for sure that hello-world 
was playing from the /var path and not the /usr path. Good idea to test 
that and see what's really going on. I think I set too much store by 
these books sometimes. But when that's all I have, I tend to go with 
what I know, and if the book is all I know ... well ...



A great reason to avoid Asterisk packages and compile from source 
instead. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.



That's how I started, by trying to build version 18 from source. It 
failed. Colossally. The compile of sources would run for a while, then 
the machine would crash spectacularly--I mean, not just hang or reboot. 
It actually turned itself off. I tried it several times, and each time 
it failed in the same way, but at a different spot in the compile 
process. If ever I could figure out a way to trace that one down, I 
would. It was the strangest thing. So I gave up trying to build from 
source and went to the distro. Truth to tell, I'd rather have been able 
to build it from source because then I could follow my book more 
closely, and I enjoy and am familiar with working with SQL. I understood 
perfectly what the book was telling me to do and how it would all 
integrate with configuring Asterisk. Very strange indeed. Maybe I'll try 
a later version and see what happens.



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Re: [asterisk-users] A stupid problem with Playback

2023-05-27 Thread asterisk

On 5/27/2023 11:37 AM, Steve Matzura wrote:
Acording to the book, I'm supposed to put things into what Asterisk 
thinks is its default audio file location, /var/lib/asterisk/sounds, 
and I'm supposed to be able to create a custom directory off of that 
path and use it in a relative-syntax way in the Playback directive, 
like so:

...

    same => n,Playback(mysounds/mygreeting)

I'm here to tell ya, it doesn't work on my system. However, if I write:

    same => n,Playback(/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/mydir/mygreeting)

it works fine. Where is the default directory defined? I search every 
configuration file and found no such definition.


/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/en
Relative paths are relative to your language-specific directory.

And then there was this: When I finally got my system working after 
all the connectivity and extension-not-found and endpoint-not-found 
nonsense straightened out, I of course tried the hello-world standard 
startup test. It didn't work. Why? Because when you install Asterisk 
version 16 from the Debian distro site, you don't get the core sounds, 
and when you do install the core sounds package, they don't get put 
into /var/lib/asterisk/sounds. Oh no--they get put into 
/usr/share/asterisk/sounds. In there, I found several directories such 
as 'en' and 'en_us'. I copied the files from the en_us directory into 
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds and hello-world worked fine. So then I 
created a custom directory and put my own things in it, changing the 
Playback statement to the first one above, and it failed. I have to 
specify the full path instead of using the relative syntax version 
thereof. This is technically not a problem, more just a curiosity as 
to why it didn't work the way I thought it's supposed to.


A great reason to avoid Asterisk packages and compile from source 
instead. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.


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