Wrong.

The phone call to resolve this issue took a hair under 29 minutes which I found to be acceptable. The rep was thorough and confident in her solution.  I had to unseat my pri card and fax card, unplug the daughtercard from the PRI card. Put the daughtercard back on. Then reseat again with a few reboots during the process. The support person told me the echo cancellation module is bad. Fair enough, but man that isn’t a part a normal person should be messing with.

I have to pay to ship it back, then they send a replacement or I could leave a credit card number and pay to return the broken component using the box I get the new one in. How ghetto is leaving a credit card number for a cheap part replacement on a $16k product? I should tell Amex to block all purchases from this company just to show that having a credit card on file is worthless to them but a substantial risk to my company. The support call ended by leaving me with a bunch of paperwork to do. Some platinum support. After my support call Friday, my company dealt with a DB server all weekend so I didn’t have time to RMA the part.

Today unraveled all the process of a new digium account. username vs email address, password resets etc, set up my account and got started. I RMA’d the part using their strange form. Digium states that they will overnight parts in all the sales materials contract. The sales people conveniently leave out the one day processing time documented on the RMA page.

I have to pay for whatever shipping option I choose outside of UPS ground. Digium’s support page states that they will ship in a business day, not today. Then you wait the additional shipping time you choose (overnight, 2day, 3day, ground, etc.) I am guessing about the best you can do is 2 days, and the worst case is going to be about a week.

In our case, we report the problem on Friday, their ridiculous setup requires more than a 30 minute phone call to arrange the replacement. We got the Digium account information all set up on the web page, do the RMA form, deal with their strange layouts Monday. It should ship Monday or Tuesday, and with UPS ground I should have my part by what Thursday or Friday? From reading the helpful mouse overs on the support page, I’m not even sure if this part will ship before they get the broken one. So I had the front desk lady ship our broken card right away. Platinum support my ass.

I was under the impression that you are mostly paying for support when you buy an appliance. So far the support from Digium sucks donkeys. When the support sucks, you want root. We have no root access to fix things ourselves. The hardware is cheap. I really wonder if we would be better off running asterisk on a poweredge instead of an old supermicro board in a poorly built server.

We had already planned on buying a second set of hardware to keep on the shelf. I think this is absolutely necessary if you are going to run a digium phone system. It is still cheaper than buying a shortel/avaya/cisco solution but you get what you pay for.

I took pictures of all the innards etc. I’ll get to work on a review once I have some experience. Who knows, maybe the functionality will live up to expectations. So far support falls way short. The hardware might end up ok but it isn’t off to a great start. Overall I’m trying to remain optimistic. If we can make it work, it will save our company tens of thousands.  Of which I will see 0 which makes me wonder, why do a struggle with open source/cheap solutions like this? It is completed on my personal time, not the company time. Maybe it is time to start buying solutions like Cisco/Avaya.

So you can see that the CPU clock speed drops more than 40% in power saver mode on my Dell Precision 6300.

So if you have ever wondered why your computer was so slow when it is unplugged, go check your power settings.

I was trying to find about the quickest way to look for my CPU speed again. I think i like this little wmi one liner. Processor clock speed should be easier to look up, but MS thinks you want to know the model, stepping number before what it is to a normal person.

Go in the BIOS

Disable Flash cache

Switch from AHCI to ATA disk mode

save and reboot

This will unbluescreeen, allow you to update all of your patches, then go grab all the latest drivers and firmware from Dell Support. 

Linux does this too on certain machines/chipsets. Man it is a pain when they switch interfaces, the OS guys take years to recover.

 For now I’d recommend giving it a try. Just download the .bin file that matches your model, and apply it just like a linksys firmware. If you want to switch back, download the latest from linksys.

Take your tv to confession and buy a killawatt!! Spend $17 on this thing then start the fun. Plug your TV in to it. See how much power it is sucking while it is off? That is crazy AND makes the Pope sad. Now you have a few options to atone for your sins:

-go to confession

-Pick up some x10 gear and create a wireless power network that shuts all the offenders off while you are away.

-Hook major offenders up to cheap surge strips and turn things off that aren’t in use.

-Buy more efficient appliances

-Use that pesky light switch that controls a wall outlet for no good reason(until now) Leave the house? Flip the switch and kill power to the toaster, tv, and a few lamps. No reason to power the computer monitor or the automatic cat whacker if you aren’t around to see them work.

There is a way better one called Watt’s up pro. It will do a bunch of samples and connect to a pc. It costs $115.