ISDN / VoIP solution?

Posted by: o'wolf 18 years, 4 months ago

(1 comment)

After reading that AVM is dropping their Linux support for passive ISDN cards I was looking for a long-term replacement of my current fax and voice mail solution.

The AVM FritzBox Fon would be nice, however:

• It lacks voice mail functionality.
  
  Even though it would be possible to add. There is a third-party solution for that, however it can only send voice mails via e-mail, but not store them on a USB attached disk. And I haven't found the source code so I could extend it myself.


• It does not receive faxes.
  
  Granted, this would not be trivial to add, as the CPU power of the box is too low. There is a fax software -- for a Windows system connected to the box. Haha.


• It apparently cannot divert incoming ISDN calls to an external number.
  
  Instead it sets up a new connection on the second ISDN channel to forward a call, thus losing the caller id of the original call and blocking two channels.


• How long do I get security updates for that thing?


• I bet at least parts of the ISDN kernel driver is some binary-only stuff again, getting me into the same trouble I'm about to have with my current solution as soon as AVM drops support for the box.

I could work around the fax issue with an analog MODEM to the PC, but this means yet another box and another power supply under the desk. I cannot work around the voice mail issue -- that would require an RS232 connected ISDN "MODEM" connected to the PC -- at the price of the FritzBox. And frankly, I want to get rid of the power-consuming PC while I'm rebuilding the setup. It is a safety risk after all, as the loss of cooling due to a broken fan or some defect of the power supply could set my apartment on fire. Thus, I don't want to run a desktop PC unattended for a long period of time.

Yet, there does not seem to be any way around the PC, I fear. I wasn't able to find a stand-alone fax receiver that just stores the faxes on some flash media or hard disk drive, to be picked up via a network connection. Nor an answering machine that doing it. And besides, I don't want to have tons of devices and power supplies wasting space and energy.

But if I resort to a PC-based solution, I'll also have to keep the passive ISDN card, as active cards are plainly unaffordable. And with that I'm right back where I started. Well, I could try the mISDN drivers, however this means that I have to rebuild the drivers after every kernel update -- and who knows how long these will be supported, given that they haven't been submitted to the Linux kernel tree for more than three years. (And last time I checked, the FritzCard PCI v2 driver crashed the machine on every second call received. Granted, that was several months ago, but I still see reports about that on the mailing list.)

And my main concern: how much can I trust the electrical safety of the power supply for a miniITX board? Even if it gets 12 Volt from an external power supply, it still has to create 3.3 V and 5 V, having to deliver a quite high current for both.

Is there anything on the market like the AVM FritzBox Fon that does handle fax, voice mail (and can divert incoming calls properly, perhaps)? Preferably under 400 Euro?

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