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Vicidial, Asterisk 1.6, and DAHDI

PostPosted: Fri Jan 16, 2009 12:01 pm
by mcargile
A while back I posted about getting Asterisk 1.6 and Vicidial to work together. At the time it was a small change but since then Digium made two major changes that effect Vicidial.

The first was that they changed the manager interface to 1.1 instead of 1.0. They added a number of manager commands and changed the formatting of some of the headers and responces. Luckily the only thing that actually effected Vicidial (as far as I know) was the actual change to the version string. Support for this was added to Vicidial and was working the last time I checked.

The second came as somewhat of a surprise. Due to trademark issues with the word Zaptel, Digium changed the name of Zaptel to DAHDI. They gave 1.4 support for both DAHDI and zaptel, but in 1.6 you can only use DAHDI. With asterisk 1.6 all of the zap commands have been changed to DAHDI commands. All of the zap channels have been turned into dahdi channels. This means that in order for Vicidial to work correctly with dahdi we need to add a check to see if the version of asterisk is 1.6 and if so anywhere were we do anything with a zap we instead do it with dahdi. This is by no means a small undertaking and will require many hours of development. So much so that we cannot add support for 1.6 in our spare time. We either need to have a customer pay to add this or get donations from the Vicidial community.

Now you might be asking why bother adding it if asterisk 1.2 and asterisk 1.4 work perfectly fine. Well first off there were a number of design changes to the back end of asterisk in 1.6 that should greatly improve its performance. This means that a Vicidial system using 1.6 SHOULD be able to support more lines and agents. They have also added a number of other features that would be nice to integrate into 1.6. Second off 1.2 is in security mode release and will not work with newer Linux kernels (they are not updating the 1.2 zaptel drivers for kernels higher than 2.6.26), and 1.4 will eventually be placed in this boat as well. Lastly there is nothing better for generating high load over a long period of time in asterisk than Vicidial. Adding support for 1.6 will mean that we can really test it thoroughly and help Digium fix any bugs that we find. Before they added the DAHDI stuff to 1.6 I was able to help Digium fix another of issues with IAX.

Basically what I would like to know is how much interest there is at this time in adding Asterisk 1.6 support to Vicidial and if there is anyone in the community willing to donate to the cause?

PostPosted: Fri Jan 16, 2009 3:19 pm
by Trying
I can't donate much but I will donate. The question is..... how do we get the rest of the community to also participate? How about you tell the community how much the project will cost and let's all start putting money in?

For the cause!

PostPosted: Fri Jan 16, 2009 7:31 pm
by lmoreira
Hi,

This sounds great. I'm using Asterisk 1.4.21 and Vicidial 2.0.4 with 30 agents. No serious issues, but CPU usage is high. I'm willing to donate for support Asterisk 1.6.

PostPosted: Thu Jan 22, 2009 2:15 pm
by mcargile
It will probably take 10 hours to actually do the coding and that is just to provide the current level of functionality that 1.4 and 1.2 offers. The actual testing will probably take quite a bit more time.

Also please keep in mind that once we add support for 1.6 there is no guarantee that 1.6 will be stable enough to use Asterisk on for quite some time. We have not suggested using Asterisk 1.4 till 1.4.21 because it would crash and actually use more load. The design of 1.6 should reduce the load but that does not mean that poor coding in one of the channel drivers will not break stuff.

PostPosted: Thu Jan 22, 2009 2:27 pm
by Trying
Well, I have full confidence that it will be money well spent in the long run. I am willing to sponsor one hour. How about the rest?

PostPosted: Thu Jan 22, 2009 3:56 pm
by lmoreira
mcargile, it's very clear and looks good way to start. I'm willing to sponsor 10% of the project, just let us know the total custs.

Luc

PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 8:13 pm
by Alek
I am willing to sponsor 1 hour. I have only one customer with Vicidial, but hopefully will pick up some more over time. It is a very good project. I like to keep it kicking.

PostPosted: Sat Jun 06, 2009 4:13 pm
by Leo_Surf
I am willing to sponsor as well, but I would like to know the cost.

PostPosted: Sun Jun 07, 2009 7:59 am
by mflorell
Please email me directly: vicidial -at- gmail.com

PostPosted: Sat Jun 13, 2009 3:59 am
by bobbymc
im also willing to sponsor 10% of it

PostPosted: Sat Jun 13, 2009 5:27 am
by mflorell
I just added DAHDI support a couple weeks ago to SVN trunk. This was the easy part :)

PostPosted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 5:38 am
by speed
I will donate !!
I think this is a realy good projekt and i hab one customer.. now ,, :-)

euro / dollar is also good for me :-)

give me paypal account an i will donate a little bit ,,

cu speed

PostPosted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 3:01 pm
by mflorell
vicidial -at- gmail.com

thanks!

Re: Vicidial, Asterisk 1.6, and DAHDI

PostPosted: Tue Jul 17, 2012 11:12 am
by bobbymc
matt are you still working on 1.6, or jsut 1.8 and vicidial + asterisk 1.6 is dropped?

Re: Vicidial, Asterisk 1.6, and DAHDI

PostPosted: Wed Jul 18, 2012 9:11 am
by mcargile
Vicidial will never support 1.6. It is too unstable. With the addition of asterisk 1.8 support, 1.6 might work as well. We will not support it however. Anyone asking questions about asterisk 1.6 will be told to upgrade to 1.8 or downgrade to 1.4.