Trials and tribulations of setting up the X100P/X101P

NOTE: AM Productions is not responsible for damages of any kind that result from the use/misuse of the following instructions.

Asterisk X100P/X101P

OS: FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT Asterisk: 1.2.9.1 (From net/asterisk) Zaptel: 1.0 (From misc/zaptel + patch)

After spending numerous hours trying to get my X101P card to work reliably with Asterisk I was ready to give up and purchase a more expensive FXO card.

The symptoms of my problems were that the line would not be hung up when the far end disconnected. Long blank voicemails. callerid.c: Caller*ID failed checksum and callerid.c: fsk_serie made mylen < 0 messages. I do have supervisor disconnect enabled on the line so the X101P would reliably detect that the other person disconnected, but it would sometimes not hang up the line when this event was detected. This was confirmed by seeing the Hungup 'Zap/1-1' message with verbose set to 10 (asterisk -rvvvvvvvvvv).

After much head banging and fiddling with different settings in zapata.conf I found a forum post that someone having the similar issues said disabling any other devices on the same IRQ fixed the problem. After a quick vmstat -i I saw that the sound card was sharing the IRQ. Since I wasn't using it I disabled it and magically everything started working. I still occasionally get the caller id checksum failure, but that is only about 5 percent of the time, which is much better than before.

Fixing the remaining problems

If you are still having weird problems such as call progress detection not working or poor sound quality you will need to correctly adjust your gain settings.