Sigmundvoid

The  subject of this article sounds rather harsh, but with all my commitment and effort to Ubuntu in the past 8 months it seems its exactly what I did, pushed it to the side.

Ubuntu is probably the best distribution that I have used, considering I have used pretty much all of them over the years. But I made a pledge to myself and actually to my work mates, that if any Linux distribution interferes with my productivity than its back to
Windows.

I can hear you calling me a traitor*, or sticking a label on my head reading "Quitter",  for one I use Photoshop, yes, I could use GIMPShop, but I don’t want to worry about compatibility issues handing designs to a printer who uses Photoshop exclusively.

I need to use Visual Studio… MonoDevelop is not really compatible  with Visual Studio
in regards to opening solutions etc.  I  need to use Office 2007 Excel worksheets, it really
does look bad emailing a client asking them to convert it to xls, why should they suffer
for my choice of OS? Or hinder another co-worker to convert it for me.

Alot of solutions I have tried out and researched to get around these obstacles, my favorite of all is using VirtualBox with their new "co-herence" feature that allows
me to run these applications seamlessly into my Linux desktop. 

Office 2007 worked in this environment,  Photoshop just hated it, glitching  on loading large PSD files which would eventually crash out VirtualBox, thinking it was a memory issue I upgraded my laptop to 2.5 gig, still the same. Visual Studio also was darn slow to,
3D Studio Max had glitchy GUI display issues.

Right now I am running Vista, sure is slow compared to Ubuntu and I dare not open and
unleash IE onto the web, even though I have 2 virus killers running as well as Windows
Defender. But I am pretty much compatible now and can run what I need to get through my work day with little hassle. Some would say I am now part of the "collective" again, but  I just see my productivity get where it should be, I dont have to
worry about compatibility issues with regards to my clients with any form of data exchange.

With all this said, I will be install Hardy Heron, because I am actively interested in Ubuntu, since I use it for many server applications,  but with the advances that Ubuntu
put into every release it will be exciting to see what they put into Heron.

*Grow up..

As of Jan 1st 07 Executone will be pulling the plug on support for all its phone systems, since alot of you out there may have a system by Executone, just a little plug here, but if you think its time for a nice brand new phone system that is VoIP which yours truely help build, then swing over to Netstar Communications

Ok, plug over:)

Some of you will find this boring and some of you will say “Dang, sweet!”, I would of said the latter today, so what am I rambling on about?
Asterisk producing HDLC errors , a client of mine had loads of dropped calls with thier Asterisk phone server, the logs showed HDLC errors, usually relating to something up with the PRI card or PRI itself.

It was a spanking new server, so why on earth are we getting these errors? Well firstly I focused on the Zaptel area, the software element that allows Asterisk to communicate with hardware, i.e, the PRI card, a Digium TE110P. So first I first ran a program which you will find in your Zaptel source directory, its called zttest, run it and you will see alot of percentage values appear, anything under 99.8xx% is a cause for concern,
I had 94%, 96% and if I was lucky, 99%, once or twice.. This tells me that there is something up with the way the drivers are communicating to the card.

Well I found an IRQ conflict, removed the offending module since they dont need USB and disabled the USB device within the BIOS, still the
same values. I thought this one had me licked, but I read that if the hard drive does not have DMA on then call quality suffers significantly and dropped calls usually follow. Sure enough, DMA wasnt enabled, so using hdparm I was able to switch it on.

Rebooted, feeling kind of sure I got this… Nope! still the same, again, using hdparm I tested the I/O speed of the Hard drive, 4 Meg a second was the result, terrible! So I disabled the onboard IDE and installed a 3rd party IDE card, this time it worked like a charm. The client is reporting no more dropped calls, go figure huh, such a simple thing like DMA could cause so much havoc. So if you admin Asterisk boxes and come up with the same error, try the simple stuff first:) Anyway, instead of running zttest you can also run zttool and look for IRQ misses, this usually refers to an IRQ conflict, there should be no misses..

[tags]Asterisk, Voip, PRI, HDLC, DMA,[/tags]