First, I would like to say that the AA50 is not a recommended product.  Actually, I think it's the opposite of it.  I would recommend an analog Phone with a voicemail recorder before I would recommend one of these things.  Why do I have such harsh feelings towards it?  Well, support personnel is unable to realize that a PBX has major issues if it reboots randomly and prevents you from leaving voicemails or getting voice prompts.  I even tried to make them understand by explaining to them that the problem is not an advance or unsupported feature, but one that's critical to the basic intended functionality of the device itself.  My response was "It's not meant to be used as a full PBX".  Secondly, they told me the issues are being worked on, but they haven't figured it out yet.  Uhh… my support ticket was created about a year ago!  Response "Do you know how hard it is to rewrite a firmware?"  I'm a very patient and understanding person, but if you fail to recognize a critical issue with a product at such a simple level, I feel my point will never be accepted.  Just imagine if Toyota took a year to fix their brake problems or say the cars weren't suppose to be fully used that way…. 

I'm proud to do Digium's job for everyone by providing the public community a work-around and documenting what I've learned.  Hope this help others.  As for the AA50, I will never buy anything solely and directly made by Digium again.  Buy Sangoma and use open-source Asterisk.

Background: http://www.keycruncher.com/blog/2009/11/02/digium-confirms-major-issues-with-aa50-voip-appliance-spotaneous-reboots-and-memory-card-write-lock-a-review/

Symptoms:

1. The system reboots randomly and frequently
2. The system loses access to the compaq flash filesystem frequently, thus no voicemails or voicemenu prompts or even backups.
3. The system prevents you from deleting voicemails due to the issue with Symptom 2.

Detail Description:

Basically, the reasons are:  Memory leak(s) (Symptoms 1) and Memory card write-locks (Symptoms 2,3)

Work-around:

Create an automated cronjob to reboot the system on a nightly basis.

1. Create a script (reboot-24hrs.sh) in /etc/config (use this directory because it's backed up to the local storage; not flash storage)
   #!/bin/sh
   sleep 86400
   /bin/asterisk -rx
   reboot

Edit /etc/config/rc.local and add /etc/config/reboot-24hrs.sh &

What if you wanted to rebuild your compact flash card?  The answer is simple:

• The appliance on startup (/etc/rc) mounts the compact flash using this command:  "mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 /var/lib/asterisk/sounds"

1. /sbin/create_sounds (Formats the compact flash memory card and creates the proper sounds directory.  It also downloads the files from the Internet)
2. /sbin/update_tz (Downloads time zone files from the Internet)
3. /sbin/update_phoneprov (Downloads phone provisioning files from the Internet)

You see and hear the buzz word swarming around the internet of networks with special setups that tout “High Availability” or sometimes commonly known as “H.A.”. What is it? What does it do for my business? Ultimately in today’s economic climate… Can I afford not to have it?

There are actually different types of HA that you can implement into you IT infrastructure. At its core, HA is a system designed implementation that ensures a certain absolute degree of operational continuity during a given measurement period. In simple business terms, HA makes sure your employees are able to continue working even if primary service providers or servers or your local network experiences some sort of an outage. Yikes!

As an example:

• Can you afford to send your employee’s home because your office internet connection is down? And your ISP is telling you sometime between 9am-6pm repair ETA.
• Can you afford half or potentially a full day of employee downtime because the file server is being re-built from the Ground, Up?
• Can you afford to have your website, email server, FTP server, and/or other in-house hosted services go down!?

For small to medium sized business, you need a solution – High Availability.

Most administrators of small to medium sized networks are probably already assuming you need twice the amount of hardware, extra connectors, licenses, and more. Depending on the current network equipment you have, High Availability to a certain degree can very easily be a viable option.Lets take a very common scenario as a prime example of what High Availability can do.

Your Users: You have a user base of 30 people. All with varying job tasks which rely heavily on internet access to go about those tasks.

Your Network: Your have DSL service from your local ISP. You have a Cisco router/firewall, medium grade switch, a file server and a Directory server, and a few occasional remote VPN users.

The Outage: Your internet is somehow disconnected or cut off! Covad can’t help until they send a 1st level support tech to check their field equipment, someone between 12pm-6pm. And this may not even be a field equipment problem.

• you have 30 people grumbling they can’t get work done.
• you have 30 people grumbling they can’t access your online company email.
• you have 30 people standing around the water cooler.
• you have the CEO at a remote location unable to access the internal company files.
• your travelling remote sales associate can’t make the sale because they can’t VPN to access the internal company sales files.
• you’re at the mercy of your local ISP’s support to fix the problem in a timely manner.

With a very simple High Availability setup, you could be saved. This is a very common and possible situation and a High Availability setup may alleviate the frustration, anger, and the ever possible firing of office employee’s.By choosing a business level Cisco router, you get the benefit of a very customizable and upgradeable platform. You may think the price for Cisco equipment is high, but their products are truly made for business. You would never want to trust “home” equipment to run your core business infrastructure do you (this is another topic)?

The Answer: To avert a potential disaster, you have a very short shopping list. All you would need to implement a “High Availability – Dual ISP – Redundant internet connection – Redundant VPN” office network is a specific Cisco hardware module aka “WIC” module, a secondary DSL internet provider (other than your primary -Covad), and a few minutes during office downtime to get it all installed and configured. Total hardware cost can easily be had for under $300, and total monthly cost for a secondary DSL line might be $25 (shop around). If you didn’t have a High Availability setup, you may have lost MORE due to the office down. Lost employee production, lost sales, lost clients, lost trust, and who knows… a Lost Job.

“The Outage” has been avoided. Your High Availability Cisco router setup automatically switched over to the secondary ISP, and you were alerted of the switch over. Your employee’s continue along with their tasks, and may not have even noticed the internet disruption.
And because you were alerted of the ISP failover, you can easily send out a “Daily Tech Update” to your remote and C-level staff, letting them know to use the secondary Cisco VPN profile or to call you for assistance.

• The failover change was nearly invisible.
• Staff keeps working.
• Staff trust of the network maintained.
• President, CEO’s and Management trusts you’re the right guy.
• Staff maintains or gets new sales, customers, service.
• You’re still employed!

Sometimes, no matter how many times you uninstall TCP/IP or Network drivers, your computer refuses to connect properly to the network. Signs usually entail erratic network connectivity, webpages won’t load when first accessed, no ip address is bound to the adapter, etc. The instructions below provide a way to essentially REINSTALL TCP/IP and fix corrupted Winsock registry values. If these steps do not work, the best thing to try is to run a repair using your Windows 2000 CD.
1. Remove TCP/IP
Note Before you remove TCP/IP, make a note of the IP and the DNS settings.
1. Click Start, point to Settings, and then click Network and Dial-up Connections.
2. Right-click Local Area Connection, and then click Properties.
3. In the Components checked are used by this connection list, click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).
4. Click Uninstall, and then in the Uninstall Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) dialog box, click Yes.
5. When you are prompted to restart your computer, click Yes.
2. Delete the Bind registry value, the Tcpip subkey, the Winsock subkey, and the WinSock2 subkey
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. In the left pane, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and then expand SYSTEM.
3. Expand CurrentControlSet, and then expand Services.
4. Expand lanmanserver, and then click Linkage.
5. In the right pane, right-click Bind, and then click Delete.
6. In the Confirm Value Delete dialog box, click Yes.
7. Expand lanmanworkstation, and then click Linkage.
8. In the right pane, right-click Bind, and then click Delete.
9. In the Confirm Value Delete dialog box, click Yes.
10. Right-click Tcpip, click Delete, and then in the Confirm Key Delete dialog box, click Yes.
11. Right-click Winsock, click Delete, and then in the Confirm Key Delete dialog box, click Yes.
12. Right-click WinSock2, click Delete, and then in the Confirm Key Delete dialog box, click Yes.
13. Restart your computer.
3. Reinstall TCP/IP
1. Click Start, point to Settings, and then click Network and Dial-up Connections.
2. Right-click Local Area Connection, and then click Properties.
3. Click Install, click Protocol in the Click the type of network component you want to install list, and then click Add.
4. In the Network Protocol list, click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and then click OK.
5. Replace the IP and the DNS settings with the values that you made note of at the beginning of the “Remove TCP/IP section.”