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Conference Bridge and Zaptel Cards?

Posted by tschilbach on Fri, 02/26/2010
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Thirdlane platform General Questions

I have been racking my brain and resources now for 2 montsh trying to get a conference bridgeline up and running.

I have traced and tried everything and today I am told that I need to have a ZapTel card in my system to correctly initiate the timer. Well those drivers require me to compile the kernel on the out of the box CentOS CD that I got when I purchased Thirdlane.

So my question is, does anyone have Conference Bridging working without a Zaptel card? Did everyone who used the CentOS version of this product have to recompile the kernel to make this simple feature work?

Any insights would be awesome before I start ripping apart our environment.

Submitted by eeman on Fri, 02/26/2010 Permalink

well #1 zaptel is dead, you should be using DAHDI as it replaced zaptel over a year ago.

secondly you merely need a good timing module like zaptel_dummy to do timing. HOWEVER you cannot do it on some virtual machine because a dummy driver requires access to the RTC (realtime clock) to do timing.

lastly system load can impact timing and tools like dahdi_test will score your timing. Anything less than 99.98 is crap

NO FRAME BUFFERS... not Xwindows, no XDM or KDM login screens. Init mode 3 only.

Submitted by cbbs70a on Sat, 02/27/2010 Permalink

Not long ago I wrote up a proposal for a customer who wanted a conference room solution for 600-700 users. The guy loved the proposal until he went shopping for SIP trunking. Then he had an aneurism and that was the end of the project. Check out "app_konference" at http://sourceforge.net/projects/appkonference. Its a fork of "app_conference" and is supposed to scale to > 1000 users without issue, not that anyone I know really needs that kind of scalability. One of its features is that it does not require a timing source. I spoke to a few people that use it and it came highly recommended.
Regards;
FSD

Submitted by tschilbach on Sat, 02/27/2010 Permalink

Thank you both for your input. my team installed DAHDI and I can now get the conference bridge lines going. Right now we have scaled out more than 300 customers and they all want bridge lines. Most are high volume call centers.

I am going to check the link out for appkonference so thank you very much for that. We have found there are many many companies in our area looking for a large conferencing solution that does video and as well as audio. If this system can work with our native polycom VTC's then I think it may have potential.

SIP trunk pricing is not bad since we own the trunks and broker our deals with over 300 carriers. This keeps our services very very cheap as we can negotiate better rates due to high call volume.

eeman, I dont know why anyone would try and run everything on a single server. I am looking to tear apart all of the pieces into a new set of hardware (12 processor, 64GB RAM and 8TB of disk space) just for the asterisk piece. We are looking to place the DB and Web Interface elsewhere since they do nothing but chew up precious compute cycles that I can be using for customer voice traffic.

Any recomendations to look at as we scale hardware vs max connections?

Thanks in advance!