Sound drops out while on a call with a beep on the other end

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hello all,

My apologies, first of all, for any stupid statements that I am about to make. Our Asterisk admin left and we haven’t been able to hire a new one yet. I am trying to learn all I can about how Asterisk works in the meantime and I am finding out what a robust piece of software it is.

An issue recently developed during phone calls (either incoming or outgoing) where the sound will drop out for a second and the person on the other end of the line says that they hear a beep. My boss thinks that this is being caused by calls being recorded somehow (which he does not want) and he wants me to, first of all, make sure that calls aren’t being recorded and second, fix the call quality.

I have gone all through (at least as much as I know how) the phone configuration and the Asterisk configuration that I can get to from FreePBX and turned off anything that resembles recording but the issue still persists. I have googled and searched on this forum for a problem like this and, while I have found some that sort of resemble this issue, I haven’t found any that are an exact match. I saw one article that suggested that it could be human voices getting confused with DTMF tones. I don’t think that that is occurring because, contrary to what the post indicated, the issue occurs for men with low voices as well as women with high voices. Another article that I read suggests suggested to look in /var/spool/asterisk for recordings, which I did, and it doesn’t look like there are any recordings being made. I’m kind of reaching the end of what I know how to do so I need to ask for help from the community. Does this issue sound familiar to anybody?

We are running version 1.2.24 of Asterisk with the FreePBX front end. The server has two NICs which are on a switched network with the phones. We are a small company and the switches that the Asterisk box are using are part of the network that the rest of the computers are on. I know that this is probably a bad design, but we needed a way to have the VoIP traffic go through our firewall to connect with another Asterisk box at our parent company. Since we are small and only have 20 computers on the network, it didn’t seem to affect call quality at all. Apart from that, the box is not publicly accessible. We have a Zaptel card that is hooked up to our T1 VoIP line from AT&T.

Any help or suggestions for figuring out what is causing this issue would be much appreciated.

Regards,
John

2

bump

3

Do you have any CLI output from when the problem occurs?

Ian

4

Ian, thanks so much for the response. I have only been watching the CLI output because I don’t know how to capture it to a text file. Since this is happening any time that a person is on a call, I’ll ask somebody tomorrow to tell me when they’re going to be on a call and I’ll try to get a good capture of the CLI output. Would I just put the whole output into a post here or is there a better way to post it? Thanks again for taking the time to respond.

Regards,
John

5

Just post the output from a call that has the problem - that will be a start anyway.

Ian

6

Ian,

I’m still working on getting the CLI output. I made a VNC connection to our VoIP server and I got good output for a call with a beep. Unfortunately, I stepped away for a little bit and the VNC screen turned black and I had to restart the VNC server to get back in. Because I had to restart the VNC server, it ended my session and all of my CLI output was gone. I will get some tomorrow and post it up. Sorry for the delay.

Regards,
John