Dahdi goes missing after upgrade

Hello everyone –

All is well now, but I’m posting this to learn what happened, to record the fix for others, and to ask a general question, which is: is it better to stick with a configuration that works, or to patch the OS and Asterisk software to stay up to date with bug/security fixes?

Current installation is Centos 5, Asterisk 1.4. Last night I did “yum update” and found that a newer version of the dahdi drivers was available. I went ahead with it and, after a reboot (it was 3:00 a.m., what the hell), found that Asterisk had started, but the dahdi drivers had not loaded. “Service dahdi restart” generated error messages indicating that the drivers for the TE220 and AEX2400 cards could not be found. Once the panic subsided, I downloaded, compiled and installed new dahdi drivers using the instructions in the Digium documentation for the cards (wget, make, make install…). That process demanded that I update the Linux source, which I did (yum update kernel-devel and kernel-headers). Then I did the install, rebooted and everything worked again.

I know I’ve provided minimal information here, but does anyone have an idea why “yum update” failed and “wget etc.” worked? If dahdi needed to update the Linux source, why didn’t it just grab it as part of the dependency resolution process?

Oh my, just got an e-mail that two FreePBX module upgrades are available. I feel the compulsion building … must go install…

Jim Shilliday