Going down the Sangoma rabbit hole

Going down the Sangoma rabbit hole

I ended up needing to configure FreeSWITCH to use a Sangoma ISDN card. At first we were foolish and used the setup script to install libraries into our system.

Cleaning up

It took dpkg -S and manual filtering to clean this mess. On a debian system there are files in /usr/ that do not belong to packages, these can be links to /etc/alternatives, or in case of python be bytecode files (*.pyc).

Second attempt with building packages

The next attempt was to use checkinstall -D make install but the source distribution of wanpipe is such a mess that checkinstall refuses to work, I have created a handmade debian package with some split up. The most annoying issues are the installation of .svn, .deps, .libs directories, using /etc/wanpipe for examples and firmware (they belong somewhere else), also installing the package requires to overwrite files of other packages (Linux comes with a wanrouter.ko too). There also appears to be some fishy licensing part, the source distribution is shipping with some .o files, the module claims to be GPL though.

First attempt with FreeSWITCH

FreeSWITCH allows to build debian packages out of the box, and it worked, it also built the freetdm module. But my module was missing support for wanpipe, adding the wanpipe-dev, rebuilding fixed the problem.

Second attempt with FreeSWITCH

After configuring the ISDN card using the wancfg_fs utility (and not allowing it to mess with the free switch config, as it is breaking it), I saw the cards but I was missing a library to actually use the card for Voice Calls.

ISDN libraries

I needed to get the libsng-isdn library, of course without sourcecode, also without a LICENSE file at all. Who may use this library? Under which circumstances? I started with checkinstall but this does not handle shlib providers very well, so I had to package the library myself

Third attempt with FreeSWITCH

I was able to recompile the FreeTDM module, and I could configure the ISDN trunk and use the the fs_cli to orginate a call.

Summary

FreeSWITCH and FreeTDM are quite powerful, also having support for creating debian packages is great too. The Sangoma experience is less exciting.

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