Don't have answers to your main questions but there is a place "share war stories." The Asterisk Wiki http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk Not that many scenarios posted, but a few. -- Jonathan Moore Director of Technology Winfield Public Schools Office 620.221.5100 Fax 620.221.0508 Quoting Ahmad Faiz <afaiz@bridge-cti.com>:> Hi all, > > I've got some questions to post in regard to running asterisk in a > production-grade environment, specifically targeting high-density IVR > applications. No VoIP involved, just straight PSTN -> * and perhaps the > occasional outdials or agent-based predictive dialing. > > 1) Which user would you run * under? > 2) What other security-related issues do you have to resolve? > 3) How do you handle crashes (murphy -will- visit you some day)? > 4) What are the best redundancy techniques to use? > 5) With respect to Digium's E1 card, what's the max # of boards you've been > able to install in a single box and still have * work well? > > Thanks in advance. Perhaps someone could start a site where users can > contribute war stories of their * deployment -- that would make for good > reading! > > Cheers, > Faiz > > > _______________________________________________ > Asterisk-Users mailing list > Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >Visit Winfield Public Schools at http://usd465.com ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/
Hi all, I've got some questions to post in regard to running asterisk in a production-grade environment, specifically targeting high-density IVR applications. No VoIP involved, just straight PSTN -> * and perhaps the occasional outdials or agent-based predictive dialing. 1) Which user would you run * under? 2) What other security-related issues do you have to resolve? 3) How do you handle crashes (murphy -will- visit you some day)? 4) What are the best redundancy techniques to use? 5) With respect to Digium's E1 card, what's the max # of boards you've been able to install in a single box and still have * work well? Thanks in advance. Perhaps someone could start a site where users can contribute war stories of their * deployment -- that would make for good reading! Cheers, Faiz
On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 15:29, Ahmad Faiz wrote:> Hi all, > > I've got some questions to post in regard to running asterisk in a > production-grade environment, specifically targeting high-density IVR > applications. No VoIP involved, just straight PSTN -> * and perhaps the > occasional outdials or agent-based predictive dialing. > > 1) Which user would you run * under?While not the best practice, root is normally used. With proper device and directory permissions, it should be able to run as anyone you wish.> 2) What other security-related issues do you have to resolve?Unload all VoIP modules if you are not using them. Other than that, do your normal network hardening.> 3) How do you handle crashes (murphy -will- visit you some day)?There is a script that I picked up from Tilghman that runs out of /etc/init.d that will continually restart asterisk unless it exited with a return of 0(one of the stop commands). It also sets it up so it dumps core in a configured directory and can email you that it has done so.> 4) What are the best redundancy techniques to use?This could be an entire book. It all depends on how you dealing with your lines and how much redundancy you wish to pay for. Someone here recently mentioned T1 devices that could do failover switching so you could have a hot spare waiting to grab the T1 line in the case of the asterisk machine going down. But this would require duplication of hardware for this to work.And this is really the biggest cost and you still have single point of failures in the actual wire itself. Of course your telco can provide you backup lines to your install, but then you incur even more cost and it will be a monthly cost.> 5) With respect to Digium's E1 card, what's the max # of boards you've been > able to install in a single box and still have * work well?2 cards max regardless of port density right now. 2 quad span cards should be just fine per machine.> Thanks in advance. Perhaps someone could start a site where users can > contribute war stories of their * deployment -- that would make for good > reading!www.voip-info.org Specifically http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+hardware+recommendations -- Steven Critchfield <critch@basesys.com>
Answering question number 5 only: My customer's system is an extremely busy IVR, used in a game-show call-in environment, with short calls and high peak call rates. The maximum number of ports so far that my system can handle, with a single fast P4 processor, is 4 E1 spans (one E400P). Even at this size of 120 channels, I experience some dropped calls and channel lock-outs (which recover every few minutes). However, there are three pieces of good news that should improve the situation: (1) There apparently is a bug is how the code buffers the frames on the E1 ports - an overflow causes many re-tries and possibly lost calls (in my experience). Mark and Martin at Digium are aware of the problem, and are currently looking into it. I will let you know what they find. (2) I've had good luck so far using a dual-Xeon processor board and Redhat's Fedora Linux. I have an IVR load-tester and the results are very encouraging. In a couple weeks I'll have results from the field. (3) Digium's TE410P has the ability to be a bus-master. This produces some minor performance gains in my tests. When all three of these things are incorporated into an environment, I think you could probably expect that the dual-Xeon setup could handle as many as 8 or more E1 spans in a heavy load IVR environment. Please let me know if you need my load tester script, as I'm happy to share it. Good luck! Scott Scott M. Stingel Emerging Voice Technology Inc. Email: scott@evtmedia.com <mailto:scott@evtmedia.com> URL: www.evtmedia.com <http://www.evtmedia.com>> -----Original Message----- > From: asterisk-users-admin@lists.digium.com > [mailto:asterisk-users-admin@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Ahmad Faiz > Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 9:29 PM > To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com > Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Operating environment for * > > > Hi all, > > I've got some questions to post in regard to running asterisk in a > production-grade environment, specifically targeting high-density IVR > applications. No VoIP involved, just straight PSTN -> * and > perhaps the > occasional outdials or agent-based predictive dialing. > > 1) Which user would you run * under? > 2) What other security-related issues do you have to resolve? > 3) How do you handle crashes (murphy -will- visit you some day)? > 4) What are the best redundancy techniques to use? > 5) With respect to Digium's E1 card, what's the max # of > boards you've been > able to install in a single box and still have * work well? > > Thanks in advance. Perhaps someone could start a site where users can > contribute war stories of their * deployment -- that would > make for good > reading! > > Cheers, > Faiz > > > _______________________________________________ > Asterisk-Users mailing list > Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users > >