Hi Linoders,

We all know Linode is great and I've been trying to migrate all my various servers to Linode for a few months now. I've succesfully migrated my web and postgresql nodes and setup a node with Asterisk 1.4 and FreePBX 2.7 to handle my voicemail. Linode is awesome.

I am currently experimenting with installing Asterisk 1.4 with ViciDial 2.2 but running into issues specific to Linode hosting/VPS/Xen and am wondering if I can get some suggestions from you. I've been working on these issues for a few days now.

Please feel free to check out my initial thread on ViciDial (before I figured out it was a Xen issue):
http://www.vicidial.org/VICIDIALforum/v ... hp?p=47035

I have searched the Linode Forum but the only relevant discussions are outdated and mention vague solutions and potential future fixes. We are literally talking discussions dating back to 2003 and 2005.

The issue I am having is that ViciDial requires Zaptel/DAHDI's meetme conference functionality which seems to require an external timer. This is commonly emulated by ztdummy or dahdi_dummy but those won't run on Xen apparantly.

Now the potential solutions suggested on the internets are to do recompile the kernel with ztdummy/dahdi_dummy support and an unrelated thread about a ztdummy patch called ztxen.

Despite my efforts I cannot find any instructions to either and therefore request your help. Let me know what you think!

Thank you very much,

Mika

In my experience, the easiest way to go is to use your distribution's kernel and dahdi package, if you absolutely must have the dahdi module loaded. That's the approach used by:

http://library.linode.com/communications/voip-services/

As best as I can tell, there is actually no ztxen. Fortunately, there's no real need for it either.

In theory, you could compile the necessary modules against the kernel source and do it that way, but ugh.

Thanks for your response.

ztxen seems to be a patch from 2007 which I've now found - haven't tested it yet. https://issues.asterisk.org/view.php?id=9592

I'll try out your linked approach if all else fails - currently deployed CentOS - so it would require a re-deployment.

CentOS should work too; it almost certainly has Xen-aware kernels available, but it might not have a suitable dahdi/zaptel package. Good news is that the "real" FreePBX install documentation is written for CentOS and I believe it does include the compilation steps.

The Linode-specific part is the pv-grub configuration... I don't think there's a step-by-step guide for pv-grub on CentOS yet, but the basics are the same. Grub is grub.

Oh, and as for the ztxen patch from that bug report... it looks like it is intended for the older kernels with Xen patches (2.6.18 and friends), more so than the newer kernels with built-in paravirtualization support (2.6.24 and later). The underlying problem no longer exists, which is a Good Thing.

Somewhere around here, I still have my medal of honor for successfully making CentOS 4 + 2.6.18.8 + ztdummy + Asterisk function, albeit briefly... those were unhappy times.

I am currently trying the Ubuntu 9.10 instructions from the Linode library - will post updates.

Update: It sort of seemed to work but still couldn't compile DAHDI from source. In any case going to re-try but this time on CentOS a platform I'm more familiar with / find more stable and should be able to port the instructions to that platform.

Update: I am currently planning on porting this to CentOS and try again. I really dislike Ubuntu for any internet-facing stuff.