SARK UCS/MVP Managed PCI Telephony Cards

SARK UCS/MVP 2.1.14 PCI

SARK UCS/MVP releases prior to 2.1.12 used a simple modprobe/proc detection technique to discover and configure telephony cards . This is OK for analogue cards but is less satisfactory for BRI/PRI and mixed set-ups which are more sensitive to the mix of modules loaded.

Releases designated 2.1.13 and later use a different detection technique which should ease integration of new cards in the future. Cards are detected using their vendor/device/subsystem ID's and checked against Selintra database entries for known, supported card types.

A map of physically installed cards is created and only those drivers necessary for the cards present are loaded at execution time. New card types can be supported by the simple addition of code handler fragments and corresponding entries in the database. Unsupported cards present in the system will simply be ignored. The following cards are supported:-

Notes
* e159:0001:b1d9:0003 includes Digium TDM400 and OpenVox A400 cards
** not on the PCI ID Database but carried by at least some TDM400 cards

What if my board isn't recognised?

The PCI ID Repository is by no means perfect and while most boards will report correct vendor/device ID values they may report non-standard values from the sub-system name fields. If your board is giving incorrect or unexpected values you can add an entry for it to the selintra database to force SARK UCS/MVP to load the drivers anyway. You can find full instructions in the appendix here.

Important NOTE!

When you upgrade to 2.1.14, the rpm will clean the selintra database by removing (physically deleting) any existing ZAP/TDM or ZAP/X100P definitions and trunks from the database.

SARK UCS/MVP 2.1.14 PCI Card Management Principles of operation

When 2.1.14 is installed and comes up for the first time, it will come up without any PCI definitions. Instead, the system will be brought up, with ztdummy loaded, in VOIP-only mode. The system administrator may then identify and configure any installed boards using the PCI cards panel.

Using PCI Cards Panel

Clicking the probe button will cause SARK UCS/MVP to automatically discover and classify any PCI telephony boards fitted to the system. Here is a sample of the output...

SARK UCS/MVP will firstly investigate the PCI cards actually fitted to the system. In the example above it has discovered an HFC ISDN card. As each card is discovered a request is scheduled to load the correct driver for the card. At the end of the discovery exercise, the load phase begins with an attempted load of zaptel. The system will then wait for udev to create /proc/zaptel and /dev/zap. Once done, drivers will be loaded for each card detected in the initial phase. Finally, the /proc/zaptel/n files will be read and displayed.

If you are happy with the output click the "commit" button. SARK UCS/MVP will proceed to configure the Selintra database to manage the card and create any necessary trunk and extension entries. The original screen will then again be displayed...

Each board may be further configured by clicking the "modify" icon alongside the generated definition.

Now you may fetch the new hardware layout into the system by bringing asterisk to a hard halt by clicking the STOP button. The PBX will be halted and the STOP button will change to a START button...

Click the START button and the system will be restarted with the new configuration. Your new card(s) are now available for use.

You can regress/reset the system by clicking the initialize button. This will remove all hardware definitions from the system and you can then re-probe. This should only need to be done when you perform a hardware upgrade/downgrade. It is envisaged that the level of granularity will increase in future releases as we gain more experience with the model.