Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists
2004-Oct-13 02:29 UTC
[Asterisk-Users] IAX pretending to see unreachable hosts and other weird things
Hi I'd like to share a weird and awkward experience... I have an Asterisk server which connects to various other Asterisk servers using IAX2 peering through IPsec tunnels. Recently this server has started to show some weird behaviour. For example, you would be able to dial out and the console would seem to confirm that there was activity but Asterisk wouldn't actually do anything other than give you a ringing feedback but not actually make any attempts to connect. I also noticed that I was able to see IAX peers which wouldn't see me. Stop-starting Asterisk typically fixed these issues but the time until those problems occurred again would become shorter and shorter. Today, I had to take the VPN server down which means all those tunnels through which this box connects to many of its IAX peers were not available. Strange as it may seem, Asterisk claims to see those peers even with varying latencies when you issue "iax2 show peers" multiple times. Those peers are definitely unreachable. Asterisk pretends to see them just as it pretended to dial when it didn't really dial. And now comes the weirdest part: I executed a "stop now" and it looked like nothing happened as I am still at the console prompt. However, checking in another terminal reveals that Asterisk has indeed shut down, yet the console is still up taking my commands albeit not doing anything. This Asterisk server has been running virtually unmodified for about a year. I am not going to bother trying to troubleshoot this any further but instead I will rebuild it with a newer version of Asterisk. I am however somewhat concerned about this because I live by the mantra "if it's not broken, don't fix it" for systems other than play/lab/test boxes. Here I have one of the longest running Asterisk boxes I look after which was working prefectly and hasn't been changed nor has it seen any increase in workload, yet it developed a kind of Alzheimer's desease, looking alright on the outside, but totally braindead on the inside. The system has a total of 18 IAX peers and whilst call traffic is very low, all of the IAX peers have qualify=yes so there is quite a bit of IAX ping/pong traffic. One of the peers has been constantly unreachable for at least three months. The box is a PIII 500MHz based IBM with 256MB RAM. It's mostly using those IAX peers but has a single X100P on which there are a few calls, mostly inbound. I have other Asterisk servers with a similar number of IAX peers with qualify=yes and on those I haven't seen anything that would suggest that IAX ping/pong traffic and unreachable hosts may have a negative impact on the server, but I would nevertheless like to ask if anybody on the list has had any remotely similar experience that would suggest system instability as a result of an increasing number of IAX peers with qualify=yes. I would also like to ask any of the developers working on IAX related code what they think about the potential impact of IAX ping/pong traffic on system health. Hopefully this is just related to the rather dated version of Asterisk on this box: CVS-11/09/03-13:18:45. rgds benjk -- Sunrise Telephone Systems, 9F Shibuya Daikyo Bldg., 1-13-5 Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. NB: Spam filters in place. Messages unrelated to the * mailing lists may get trashed.