asterisk users - Jun 2005 - Re: Dell PowerEdge SC420 interrupt issue

We're using an SC420 and using BRI with a quadbri Junganns card, with IAX 
softphones and one hardphone.

Working well except that we sometimes get dropped connections between IAX and 
the server with a max retries exceed message, which comes from the chan_iax 
driver code. The BRI side of things looks like it is fine.

I had been thinking it might be a network issue but now wonder if it is an 
interrupt or other background process issue causing a timeout on the Dell - 
hence my post as it might be the same cause as yours. We're about to 
concentrate on this hypothesis. If it is then it could perhaps be due to:

1. Linux - we're running Debian 2.6.8
2. Something in the firmware - we have twin SATA drives, though not mirrored as 
we had orginally expected.
3. E-mail background process. Doubt it as it is only used for voicemail 
messages.
4. Windows networking/SAMBA share. We only use this for configuring the conf 
files from windows and backing up configuration etc.
5. Other background process. Perhaps moh? We're using madplay though
I've just
checked and noticed a few perhaps rogue mpg123 processes.
6. Overloading? We're only a 10 person office so figure the SC420 with 2.6 G
Celeron should be enough.

So no solutions here for you but using same platform with what looks like a 
timeout/background process type issue. 

Paul

On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, Paul Redstone wrote:
> We're using an SC420 and using BRI with a quadbri Junganns card, with
IAX
> softphones and one hardphone.
> 
> Working well except that we sometimes get dropped connections between IAX
and
> the server with a max retries exceed message, which comes from the chan_iax
> driver code. The BRI side of things looks like it is fine.
> 
> I had been thinking it might be a network issue but now wonder if it is an 
> interrupt or other background process issue causing a timeout on the Dell -
> hence my post as it might be the same cause as yours. We're about to 
> concentrate on this hypothesis. If it is then it could perhaps be due to:
You could try running Asterisk with realtime privileges and see if it 
makes any difference. This will make the userland code preempt any other 
userland code. 

Peter