Using Asterisk as PRI to PRI gateway

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi,
We have been fiddling with asterisk for a while and are now wondering how we should do this:

I need to ‘share’ one PRI line between two machines (one fax server and a test pbx system). I have an spare Asterisk machine with a 4 port PRI card in it.

I tried to configure it to act as a gateway. I connected one of the card’s interfaces to our providers line, one to the fax server and one to the test PBX. In the extentions.conf I configured the spans to forward the calls from my machines to the provider using the Dial command. E.g.:

[DID_span_3]
exten = s,1,NoOp()
exten = s,2,Dial(${span_1}/${EXTEN},,r)

This ‘seems’ to work, but I get some strange results…

[ul]
[]Roughly half the faxes send this way fail with all kinds of errors, if I hookup the provider’s PRI directly to the fax server almost al faxes go through perfectly.[/]
[]The test pbx system has Siemens SIP phones connected, when I ‘open’ a line on them, they seem to request an outside line with dialtone. when connected directly to the provider, I can dial out just fine. When connected via the Asterisk gateway, the logs show me that the number I’m trying to call is somehow lost, the ${EXTEN} parameter is empty, and dialing fails[/]
[/ul]

Any help is appreciated!

2

FAX problems would hint at either using an inappropriate codec, or CPU loading issues.

I’d suspect a problem with the “dialplan” in the phone itself, for the other problem. The provider may be configured to support overlap dialling.

3

Hey David,

Thanks for the response!

This might be being terribly optimistic here, but… I don’t want to have to deal with codecs on the Asterisk box… my fax server has a fancy Dialogic fax board, and I would like to “bridge” the outside line to it… Without any knowledge of these things, I would say that ‘bridging’ the outside PRI to the inside PRI should solve all my issues… But I don’t know if there is such a thing…

4

Is that a Digium PRI card?

5

Malcolmd,

Yep, it’s a TE410P

Doest that make any difference?

Daaf

6

Means it’s the kind of thing we could help troubleshoot with you, though it might be under an OSS Subscription.

Give our Support team a ring:

www.digium.com/support