HDLC Abort: Error TE-110P Asterisk PRI card (How to Fix)

Reciently I had installed an asterisk server for my client. We put the PRI card in the server and i was getting all these errors, HDLC Abort messages when i would enter the CLI interface;

After consulting several experts and scouring the internet to find the cause of the problem, I finally called Digium tech support. The tech i spoke to was all to happy to help me and told me about this error being 99% of the time a incompatibility between the digium card and the motherboard. The tech suggested i make a loopback cable and run a bit test on the card for 10 minutes. Either one of two things would happen. The card would spit back screenfulls of errors, or the test would run no problem for 10 minutes with not a peep.

Thinking back to when I installed the card, i remembered that i had trouble getting the card to work from the begining. The first time i had installed it, i put it in the first bus slot and the computer didn't see the board at all. I then moved it to the second bus slot and it seemed to work fine. Of course there was no way to know untill i installed it on the live equiptment.

Once i installed it, i immeadiatly got the HDLC ABORT ERRORS. At the time the errors didn't seem to affect anything. The call quality was ok, the call flow worked ok. The problem was the HDLC errors were causeing the span to reset. The card would randomly drop everyones calls and it caused other call quality issues as well.

Upon revisiting the problem, i took the server down and powered it off. I took the card out of the slot and put it back in 10 times just to make sure the card was getting a really good connection with the motherboard. This time the HDLC errors were down to about 1 every 20 seconds.

I decided this was the end of it. I backed up the asterisk box.

To back up the box you need

/etc/asterisk/* #the config files and dial plan
/var/spool/asterisk/* #the voicemail and prompts

Tar this up and put it somewhere on your ftp server.

I set up the new server, transfered the PRI card to the new server and reinstalled debian with asterisk from scratch using the Xorcom Rapid Install Disk.