Topic: Zaptel Spans not working after restart

[stdean]

I've just come across a puzzling problem with one of our Sail based asterisk boxes. Apologies in advance for the length of this post, but I'm hoping that someone else has come across this before and may be able to shed some light on the cause of it.

We are running our box with a Digium TE410P card. We utilize all 4 ports with 2 of them connected to the PSTN as E1 with the second 2 ports connecting to a device which accepts T1. This machine has been operational for close to 6 months without a problem.

Today, after restarting the box after a scheduled power outage none of the spans on the TE410P were coming up. All were reporting RED alarms. Nothing had changed on the server and nothing had been changed at the telco side.

We quickly removed the card and checked the jumpers, suspecting that it may somehow have 'changed' it's state. Checking the card showed that all ports were open, which is what we expected. Re-setting the card done nothing to resolve our problem.

We tested the line from the telco by connecting to our PBX, which can accept a T1 connection. This worked fine, ruling out any telco based problems.

lspci showed that the card was being detected and zap show status showed all the spans and channels configured as they should have been. Testing the ports and observing how things were behaving with our PBX it appeared that the TE410P ports were able to send out a signal, but for some reason, it could not accept a signal.

After some trial and error, and more than a few reboots we finally found that if we have nothing connected to the TE410P ports at power up, when we re-connect all ports go green.

Has anyone every experienced this before? Everything is working fine now, but I would rather not have to visit our data centers everytime we have to power cycle one of our machines. Could this be a config issue in the way the zaptel driver is loaded?

Here are the versions we are running:

Asterisk 1.4.18.1
Zaptel 1.4.9.2-48
Libpri 1.4.3-19

This is all  bundled in the SME Server SARK distrubution. I can provide a copy of our zapata/zaptel configs if necessary.

Any pointers are much appreciated.

Conor

[SARK devs]

Best guess is that something has gone on the card when you pulled the power.  We've never had a Digium TE card give any trouble.  In our experience, they just work.   Do you have a spare card you can try?

Best

S

[stdean]

Best guess is that something has gone on the card when you pulled the power.  We've never had a Digium TE card give any trouble.

Sorry, maybe I didn't explain clearly. The server did not experience a power outage. It was shutdown normally before the building was power cycled. I would think it unlikely that this is a problem caused by a bad shutdown/power cut.

Didn't have a chance to test it with another card unfortunately. It's working fine now. I just need to be careful next time I power cycle the machine (remove cables etc..)