Trixbox, USB Stick, Grub, TDM card, what more could you want?
I stumbled across Trixbox some time ago and thought it was an excellent replacement for Shortel and Switchvox. Trixbox is a PBX system that is built on top of Asterisks. It is much like Switchvox with its web interface and ease of use. The nice thing is that the Community Edition (CE) is completely free, unsupported, but free. For this adventure, I have been working with an Openvox TDM card, Trixbox on a USB Stick, and SATA RAID. The reason I am using a USB stick is that when the RAID is active, you can not hook up a CDRom to the SATA controller. Ok, this seems fine, but when you choose IDE for SATA in BIOS, it breaks the RAID and according to the controller, it must be “Rebuilt.” I was able to get Trixbox to load onto a USB stick thanks to the people at Pendrivelinux.com and their MultibootISO application. This application uses Grub4Dos to emulate a CD-Rom drive from an ISO file. The only issue I had was when Trixbox installed the bootloader (Grub), it installed it to the MBR of the Flash drive. I was able to get Trixbox to boot off of the Hard drive by using the kernel (hd0,0)/[dir to kernel] and initrd (hd0,0)/[dir to initrd]. Once I had it booted up, I was able to modify /etc/grub.conf to remove the Flash drive. After that, I had to edit /boot/grub/menu.1st with the changed HD info. I was able to fix the MBR by using the grub-install command on the SATA Raid device, which was in a strange place. I think it was /dev/mapper/[name of RAID]. Once I referenced that, I was able to get Trixbox booting all by its self.
Now it was time to configure the TDM card and the extensions. I looked in the system config for the TDM card, but I didn’t see it. For some reason, it was not recognized as Zaptel. I am not entirely sure I understand the difference between the 2 device drivers/emulators, but all I knew is that the guide I was working from said I needed zaptel. Openvox has Zaptel drivers on their website, but I didn’t feel like compiling from scratch.
When I was on Openvox’s website, I noticed that the extra power connector on the TDM card was only needed for FXS ports. The reason is that FXS provides voltage across and FXO receives voltage. This helped explain why the all FXO card was being recognized as FXS. Once I rebooted the system, the TDM card was not being recognized by Asterisk. I tried to run the first_run scripts from Trixbox (/var/Trixbox/first_run…), but they couldn’t initialize the card. Modprobe was failing with a FATAL message meaning it can’t find the driver.
I tried to compile the driver from source, but not all of the Linux-Kernel Header files were included when I got the development files. I then tried to uninstall Trixbox with ‘yum remove [trixbox package]‘ but that wasn’t very successful. I tried to re-install Trixbox with Yum using the repository. I had a bunch of issues and dependencies issues, but eventually got Trixbox installed and running again. Now the only issue was that the system still didn’t recognize the TDM card. Now I am going to do a fresh install from USB and then start from there.
Wish me luck.
Mike