Overhead paging

I’m trying to get overhead paging working through a soundcard by following this guide:

voip-info.org/wiki/view/Sett … sound+card

Trouble is, I’m not using Asterisk@home but separate installs of Centos 4.4 and Asterisk 1.2.10.

My problem is, I don’t have a directory called /dev/dsp. When I try to call the pager I get[quote] – Executing Dial(“SIP/10-0915b0a8”, “console/dsp”) in new stack
Oct 10 19:18:32 WARNING[4010]: chan_oss.c:920 oss_request: oss_request ty data 0x0x97a980
<< Call to ‘dsp’ on console from <(null)><10> >>
<< Auto-answered >>
– Called dsp
– OSS/dsp answered SIP/10-0915b0a8
Oct 10 19:18:32 WARNING[4010]: chan_oss.c:585 setformat: Unable to re-open DSP device /dev/dsp: No such file or directory
Oct 10 19:18:33 WARNING[4010]: chan_oss.c:585 setformat: Unable to re-open DSP device /dev/dsp: No such file or directory
Oct 10 19:18:34 WARNING[4010]: chan_oss.c:585 setformat: Unable to re-open DSP device /dev/dsp: No such file or directory
Oct 10 19:18:35 WARNING[4010]: chan_oss.c:585 setformat: Unable to re-open DSP device /dev/dsp: No such file or directory
Oct 10 19:18:36 WARNING[4010]: chan_oss.c:585 setformat: Unable to re-open DSP device /dev/dsp: No such file or directory
<< Hangup on console >>
== Spawn extension (office, 80, 1) exited non-zero on ‘SIP/10-0915b0a8’[/quote]

How do I generate the right directory and files?

do you have alsa installed?

Yum it if not.

Is that with:

$ yum install alsa-driver

?

yes
yum search alsa will return the results that you need
there are three packages
alsa-lib.i386
alsa-utils.i386
alsa-devel.i386

try that

Well I have Alsa installed but there is still no /dev/dsp!

Any other ideas?

do you have chan_oss.so set to load in modules.conf? do you have chan_oss.so in your modules directory?

The file /etc/asterisk/modules.conf contains the line ‘load => chan_oss.so’

There is a file /usr/lib/asterisk/modules/chan_oss.so

Here’s another thought. Do you have a soundcard installed ‘and’ is it loading when the machine starts? Check ‘dmesg’ after startup, see if its loading. It should display a message in there.

if you have an ALSA configured sound card would you not want to comment out the OSS module and load the ALSA one?

Try one of these devices.

http://www.vikingelectronics.com/products/view_product.php?pid=29#spec

You can install a sipura to give you a POTS line and connect it to the viking above. Then you offload all that stuff from your server.

Oh, I am a numpty!

I set up the machine some time ago as a server and forgot that I had disabled the on-board sound card! I rebooted, went into the BIOS setup, switched the sound peripheral back on, during the reboot I searched for new hardware, installed the sound card and now I have a /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer. Sorry for wasting everyones time.

I had another engagement yesterday evenig so I ran out of time. It still doesn’t work but I’m pretty sure that’s just the mixer. Today I’ve remotely Putty’d into it and, in the mixer, all the channels were set to zero.

From reading the article linked above I got the impression that Asterisk can only use OSS and not ALSA. But perhaps this was just because the author was unaware of ALSA and that the world is moving away from OSS.

We already telecoms PA - I just need to be able to talk to it and using a soundcard seems the obvious solution.