Vicidial, Asterisk 1.6, and DAHDI
Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2009 12:01 pmA while back I posted about getting Asterisk 1.6 and Vicidial to work together. At the time it was a small change but since then Digium made two major changes that effect Vicidial.
The first was that they changed the manager interface to 1.1 instead of 1.0. They added a number of manager commands and changed the formatting of some of the headers and responces. Luckily the only thing that actually effected Vicidial (as far as I know) was the actual change to the version string. Support for this was added to Vicidial and was working the last time I checked.
The second came as somewhat of a surprise. Due to trademark issues with the word Zaptel, Digium changed the name of Zaptel to DAHDI. They gave 1.4 support for both DAHDI and zaptel, but in 1.6 you can only use DAHDI. With asterisk 1.6 all of the zap commands have been changed to DAHDI commands. All of the zap channels have been turned into dahdi channels. This means that in order for Vicidial to work correctly with dahdi we need to add a check to see if the version of asterisk is 1.6 and if so anywhere were we do anything with a zap we instead do it with dahdi. This is by no means a small undertaking and will require many hours of development. So much so that we cannot add support for 1.6 in our spare time. We either need to have a customer pay to add this or get donations from the Vicidial community.
Now you might be asking why bother adding it if asterisk 1.2 and asterisk 1.4 work perfectly fine. Well first off there were a number of design changes to the back end of asterisk in 1.6 that should greatly improve its performance. This means that a Vicidial system using 1.6 SHOULD be able to support more lines and agents. They have also added a number of other features that would be nice to integrate into 1.6. Second off 1.2 is in security mode release and will not work with newer Linux kernels (they are not updating the 1.2 zaptel drivers for kernels higher than 2.6.26), and 1.4 will eventually be placed in this boat as well. Lastly there is nothing better for generating high load over a long period of time in asterisk than Vicidial. Adding support for 1.6 will mean that we can really test it thoroughly and help Digium fix any bugs that we find. Before they added the DAHDI stuff to 1.6 I was able to help Digium fix another of issues with IAX.
Basically what I would like to know is how much interest there is at this time in adding Asterisk 1.6 support to Vicidial and if there is anyone in the community willing to donate to the cause?
The first was that they changed the manager interface to 1.1 instead of 1.0. They added a number of manager commands and changed the formatting of some of the headers and responces. Luckily the only thing that actually effected Vicidial (as far as I know) was the actual change to the version string. Support for this was added to Vicidial and was working the last time I checked.
The second came as somewhat of a surprise. Due to trademark issues with the word Zaptel, Digium changed the name of Zaptel to DAHDI. They gave 1.4 support for both DAHDI and zaptel, but in 1.6 you can only use DAHDI. With asterisk 1.6 all of the zap commands have been changed to DAHDI commands. All of the zap channels have been turned into dahdi channels. This means that in order for Vicidial to work correctly with dahdi we need to add a check to see if the version of asterisk is 1.6 and if so anywhere were we do anything with a zap we instead do it with dahdi. This is by no means a small undertaking and will require many hours of development. So much so that we cannot add support for 1.6 in our spare time. We either need to have a customer pay to add this or get donations from the Vicidial community.
Now you might be asking why bother adding it if asterisk 1.2 and asterisk 1.4 work perfectly fine. Well first off there were a number of design changes to the back end of asterisk in 1.6 that should greatly improve its performance. This means that a Vicidial system using 1.6 SHOULD be able to support more lines and agents. They have also added a number of other features that would be nice to integrate into 1.6. Second off 1.2 is in security mode release and will not work with newer Linux kernels (they are not updating the 1.2 zaptel drivers for kernels higher than 2.6.26), and 1.4 will eventually be placed in this boat as well. Lastly there is nothing better for generating high load over a long period of time in asterisk than Vicidial. Adding support for 1.6 will mean that we can really test it thoroughly and help Digium fix any bugs that we find. Before they added the DAHDI stuff to 1.6 I was able to help Digium fix another of issues with IAX.
Basically what I would like to know is how much interest there is at this time in adding Asterisk 1.6 support to Vicidial and if there is anyone in the community willing to donate to the cause?
