Switching to VoIP

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Chapter 11: Troubleshooting Tools

When, Not if, You Have Problems…

Each manufacturer of Voice over IP products, be they open or proprietary, has a cer-

tain amount of software and firmware code to maintain. Supporting Asterisk’s devel-

opment is a developer community with a mountain of C source code undergoing

constant revisions. Cisco has a core development team for Call Manager, a firmware

team that works on the IP phones, a developer staff for Call Manager Express, and

an open source development coordinator. Because your VoIP network is made of

software, it’s only as good as the software that runs it. At some point, through dili-

gent troubleshooting, you may pick up what you suspect is a bug.

For open source projects like Asterisk and VOCAL, the odds are good that another

user has also noted the bug. The odds are also good that the bug has already been

fixed. Then, it’s just a matter of downloading the correct source code revision, com-

piling, and installing the revised distribution. Visit these sites to sign up for mailing

lists where you can monitor the status of bug fixes and report bug-related issues and

get general troubleshooting problems:

http://lists.digium.com (Asterisk)

http://www.vovida.org (VOCAL)

http://www.openh323.org (Open H.323)

http://www.iptel.org/ser (SIP Express ...