[PLUG] Asterisk, Sangoma B600D, progress

Bill Ensley bill at bearprinting.com
Wed May 9 02:05:40 UTC 2012


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
>



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