Pop Tick Click, where is it coming from?

I have recently installed a simple VoIP Asterisk at home solution where the client wanted to control it himself. He is an attorney and is rather understanding of technology, given his profession.

He had a company come in and use a SC420 Dell machine and went with a company called CBeyond for an integrated T-1.

With the integrated T, a Wildcard TDM400P REV I Board is being used to interface with a Dell Poweredge 1650 with two 36 U160 Drives, 1Gig Ram and a single 1.2Ghz processor.

The 1650 allows you to designate the IRQ settings with the BIOS. I have set the Ether port at 11, the SCSI controller at 5 and 7 and lastly the Diguim card set at 3. I have also disabled everything not being used such as, the USB port, Serial, additional Ethernet port, PXE support, and remote console access.

What I and his firm experience is a random ticking or clicking on the out going interface, on both his old and now the new server too.

I have ran zaptest which the results have been 100% to 99.98% and noting that the noises have not matched when the seeing a 99.98%.

I am at a loss, I wonder if it is a bad Diguim card?

I have hooked my butt set up directly to the individual POTS dropped off by CBeyond and have not noticed any interference.

The sounds we are experiencing remind me much of spikes in other audio driven systems, such as a Public address system, so I wonder if I should start filtering the power, besides the UPS they have. I was thinking of putting some chokes in place between Cbeyonds 66 Block and the Digium card?

Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated!

I have also read through many user groups in regards to asterisk. I have also swapped out all the SIP phones from Sipura to Aastra 9133i’s and rewired the cabling to include a VoIP Only premise wiring, much like the old cat three days of station cabling.

Here is my interrupts
CPU0
0: 3095634 XT-PIC timer
1: 4 XT-PIC keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
3: 30877446 XT-PIC wctdm
5: 30 XT-PIC aic7xxx
7: 41312 XT-PIC aic7xxx
8: 1 XT-PIC rtc
11: 30914 XT-PIC eth0
12: 19 XT-PIC PS/2 Mouse
14: 0 XT-PIC ide0
NMI: 0
ERR: 0

And dma
4: cascade

And modules
audit 89944 2 (autoclean)
usbserial 23420 0 (autoclean) (unused)
lp 8964 0 (autoclean)
parport 36832 0 (autoclean) [lp]
autofs4 15864 0 (autoclean) (unused)
e1000 92988 1
wcusb 19552 0 (unused)
usbcore 77376 0 [usbserial wcusb]
wctdm 38560 4
zaptel 179872 12 [wcusb wctdm]
floppy 56624 0 (autoclean)
sg 36236 0 (autoclean)
microcode 5688 0 (autoclean)
ext3 85832 4
jbd 50956 4 [ext3]
aic7xxx 160880 5
diskdumplib 4940 0 [aic7xxx]
sd_mod 13968 10
scsi_mod 106924 3 [sg aic7xxx sd_mod]

Again thanks for any advice!

Yeah could be a dodgy card. Or a dodgy power supply. Or some incompatibility between the motherboard and the card. Have you got a different box you can put it in and see if it still does it?

Above I have stated this is a new server, before this, we were using a Dell SC420.

So that would leave just a “dodgy” card.

Not necessarily. Power supplies can be dodgy out of the box - although, of course, it’s not very likely. And i don’t know anything about the specific hardware compatibilities involved, but it could still be possible it’s some interaction/incompatibility between the hardware and the card and/or the specific linux kernel.

However, i think my money would be on the card being dodgy. But you’d still need to test it in another box really.

Is there any voip in the path ?

Is the server used for anything else ? Is there a peak in i/o activity when there is a click ? (harddisk activity could be the cause).

I wrote something about this subject a while ago,

asteriskguru.com/tutorials/p … noise.html

Check it out it might help you.

Grounding the server might also help.

Maybe also check replacing the cards, its a fast check to do.