Nightmare Installing Asterisk on Dell

The Vostro 200 is now Dell's entry-level system for small business. We couldn't resist the temptation and bought one to test, that was when the nightmare began. CentOS 4.4 doesn't even recognize the SATA harddrive and DVD ROM. We changed the mode from IDE to RAID in the BIOS, and was able to get through the installation. But that turned out to be a waste of time, as the installed OS was unable to mount the drive when it boot up.

We finally got Ubuntu Server 7.04 to install. It recognizes the drives in IDE mode, but we still had to modify the boot option as suggested to make it work properly. The Intel driver for the NIC card had to be copied in with a USB drive (my MP3 player :-) The version of Asterisk included with 7.04 is outdated, but compiling the most recent 1.2 release and FreePBX was a snap, after what we had gone through.

Sangoma Card's Echo Problem

We didn't have any echo problem with the Digium card, but it drops calls from time to time. Both Sangoma A200 cards we tested in two different installations have echo that could not be eliminated by Asterisk's built-in echo canceller. But the patched version of fxotune did the trick.

The next problem is fax. The stable release of spandsp and txfax/rxfax had conflict with the header files in asterisk 1.2.24. We used the old header file in spandsp to compile, but it gave an error when we tried to send or receive fax. We got around it by routing the fax to an older server. For all the problems it has, Sangoma is an expensive card. With Digium there is no driver to install.

So after all the time we spent, we are still hoping for a happy ending.