Hi, I posted this to freeswitch-users but did not receive any replies. Probably no one but the developers have a chance to know what is happening, so I'm posting it here in the hope that it jogs someone's memory. It would be nice to understand it properly. --- I built freeswitch version 1.7.0+git~20150730T192909Z~ab7f83c654~32bit for my ARM-based home server (an NVIDIA Jetson board), with the intention of using mod_portaudio with a wireless USB headset for my main home phone. It works well when running freeswitch directly as root, but when I configured freeswitch to run at system startup, mod_portaudio could no longer find any audio devices. No problem, I thought, it's a simple permissions issue. I am using the example debian init script from the wiki (this is a Jessie install with SysV init rather than systemd). It runs freeswitch as user freeswitch, group daemon using the -u and -g command-line options. So I added "freeswitch" to the audio group, then used sudo to verify that I could play sound files with "aplay" as the freeswitch user. That worked, but it did not solve the mod_portaudio failure. Thinking there must be an issue with portaudio separate from ALSA, I fetched and built the "pa_devs" utility which enumerates and prints the available audio devices. (This is basically what mod_portaudio is doing on startup.) Running as the freeswitch user, that worked too. Hmmmm. I tried running freeswitch from the command line using sudo rather than the -u and -g options, i.e. $ sudo -u freeswitch /usr/local/freeswitch/bin/freeswitch -nc and that worked as well! Then I started experimenting with -u and -g and discovered that $ /usr/local/freeswitch/bin/freeswitch -nc -u freeswitch allows mod_portaudio to load correctly, whereas $ /usr/local/freeswitch/bin/freeswitch -nc -u freeswitch -g daemon causes mod_portaudio to fail. Can anyone explain what's happening here? In both cases the process UID, GID, EUID, EGID, FUID, and FGID are the same (freeswitch:daemon) as displayed with "ps xao pid,uid,gid,euid,egid,fuid,fgid". Could this be a bug in freeswitch? There are a couple of threads from 2-3 years ago in the archives, where mod_portaudio permissions issues were never resolved and the solution remained a mystery. For the time being I guess this (not using -g) is a workaround, but I'd sure like to understand what is going on. Mark