asterisk users - Mar 2006 - Feedback from VON expo! Info on * HAandPolycomphone!!

> "Q:  What are the plans for HA?
> That's BS. Last time I checked, Asterisk's support of SRV was 
> to only grab the first SRV entry. Period. If it doesn't try 
> any more SRV hosts after the first fails, just exactly how is 
> that redundant?
This is for the phones to fail over NOT Asterisk, remember in this case
Asterisk has died so no matter what order it 'resolves' it doesn't
mater
in this case. 
> 
> "Q:  What the deal with the limit on the number of people you 
> can monitor for presence?
>     A:  There is no limit in the phone.  This is an Asterisk 
> limitation."
> 
> That's BS too. I have an email thread from a Polycom employee 
> where they recognised it was a Polycom issue and was told 
> they might have an newer version of the SIP software out to 
> address this by summer. Still can't fathom why this takes 
> months to fix, but anyway...
Can you post a referance to the tread?
> "Q:  Whats the best way to program the phone to handle failover?
>     A:  Use a DNS-SRV address for the primary server.  When 
> the phone queries the DNS server, it will receive a list of 
> all the possible servers "
> 
> This is broken to some degree. When the phone refreshes it's 
> cache, and grabs the list of SRV servers again, it will 
> continue to use them in the same manner until it refreshes 
> it's cache again, or there is a failure, even when all SRV 
> hosts have the same priority and weight. It should round 
> robin in this case.
Agreed.
 
> And in regards to Asterisk HA, and approach #2. If you have 
> your SER boxes use the send() command to stateless forward 
> registrations, you can send registrations from the phones to 
> ALL your Asterisk systems so that every Asterisk box knows 
> about every phone, and every Asterisk box can route calls 
> from/to any phone.
> 
Then you have issues with hints, voicemail, and other features.  


I will concur with you that at this time there is no simple and quick
solution to HA on *. It is what it is. I think that we are still in the
womb when it comes to VoIP. Phones have become many things to many
people, we have to realize that it has taken 50+ years for the phone to
evolve into what it is today. Many of the features we take for granted
today, (911, callerID, VoiceMail, Echo Cancelation) have only really
matured in the past 15-20 years. We got a long way to go......