SARK UCS mISDN Driver set-up.

Introduction

SARK UCS/MVP has mISDN support from release -650 onwards. In -674 the support became more tightly intergrated with the SARK Core and was extended to offer support for other third party drivers. If you have installed full-blown SARK, using an Aelintra provided .iso then you can skip to the configuration section because mISDN itslef will already be installed on your system.

Installation requires that you first install mISDN support for Asterisk. You can install it manually by downloading the code and following the guidelines at http://www.misdn.org or (recommended) you download and install the rpms from ATrpms.

Installation from ATrpms

At the linux console do...

yum install misdn --enablerepo=atrpms
yum install misdn-kmdl-`uname -r` --enablerepo=atrpms
yum install asterisk-misdn --enablerepo=atrpms

mISDN Configuration

The misdn support has a configure and start utility called mISDN. You can see its capabilities by typing mISDN at the Linux console..

If you choose the scan option, mISDN will tell you how many cards it has found and what drivers it will load to deal with them....

In the example above, mISDN has found 1 card and it has suggested the hfcpci driver. So now we can ask mISDN to build a sample XML configuration file for us by using the config option...

We can freely change this file to suit our circumstances. Looking at the output, we can see that mISDN has set our card up for point-to-multipoint operation. Here in the UK point-to-multipoint is rarely used so we will change our definition to point-to-point..

        <card type="hfcpci">
                <port mode="te" link="ptp">1</port>
        </card>

OK, now we are happy with the card definition we can start the mISDN drivers using the start option.

You can check that your card driver has been loaded by looking at the output from dmesg...

Asterisk Configuration

You also need to configure misdn.conf within asterisk. You can do this using the General Edit panel within Sail or you can do it using your favourite editor directly from the Linux console....

Here's a sample config you can use for a single HFC card running in PTP TE mode (just copy and paste it into misdn.conf).

[general]
debug=0
ntdebugflags=0
ntdebugfile=/var/log/misdn-nt.log
bridging=no
l1watcher_timeout=0
stop_tone_after_first_digit=yes
dynamic_crypt=no
crypt_prefix=**
crypt_keys=test,muh

[default]
context=internal
language=en
musicclass=default
senddtmf=yes
far_alerting=no
allowed_bearers=all
nationalprefix=0
internationalprefix=00
rxgain=0
txgain=0
te_choose_channel=no
pmp_l1_check=no
pp_l2_check=no
reject_cause=16
need_more_infos=no
nttimeout=no
method=standard
dialplan=0
localdialplan=0
cpndialplan=0
early_bconnect=yes
incoming_early_audio=no
nodialtone=no
presentation=-1
screen=-1
echocancel=yes
echocancelwhenbridged=no
echotraining=no
jitterbuffer=4000
jitterbuffer_upper_threshold=0
hdlc=no
max_incoming=-1
max_outgoing=-1

;
;  Uncomment the protocols you wish to use (careful with the port numbers).
;

[TEPP]
context=mainmenu
ports=1 ptp
msns=*

;[TEPMP]
;context=mainmenu
;ports=1
;msns=1234,5678

;[NTPP]
;context=internal
;ports=1 ptp
;msns=*

;[NTPMP]
;context=internal
;ports=1
;msns=1234,5678

OK you can start asterisk. There is nothing to do in PCI Cards because mISDN has already done it. All you need to do is to define one PTT-DiD group for each inbound DiD number you have and you need to create an outbound route which uses the appropriate mISDN channel group (TEPP, TEPTP, NTPP, NTPTP) as its primary path (TEPP is the most likely). You can think of TEPP as the outbound ISDN PTP hunt group (which is exactly what it is). If you are using PTMP then use TEPMP.

You can now test your system by making and taking calls over the ISDN circuits. You should also read up on mISDN on voip-info and visit the misdn site (http://www.misdn.org) so that you understand what we've just discussed.