asterisk users - May 2007 - is dundi worth pursuing in this situation?

At work, I have 4 branch offices at which I've deployed asterisk.
Call termination/origination at each branch office is handled either
through a frac PRI or 3rd party SIP provider.  Soon, I'll be replacing
the legacy PBX at our HQ with asterisk.

Each branch office has between 3 and 20 employees, each with their own
extension and DID, and at headquarters, we have about 70 people, again
each with their own extensions and DID.

Handling local and LD calls from all the offices isn't a big deal -
just normal call routing for that.  My main question is what to do
with calls between the offices.  Each branch is connected back to HQ
with a persistant VPN tunnel - I've tested IAX2 traffic over these
tunnels before, and things work great.  Since this works fairly well,
I envision using IAX trunks for all intra-office calls.  So - in this
situation, would it be easier to just manage the office dialplan(s)
and call routing manually, or would it be worth it to set up dundi for
extension discovery?

Thanks!

-- 
Erik Anderson
http://andersonfam.org

I have run into the exact same situation and have the same question.  I did
it in the dial plan manually due to time contraints but if DUNDi or ENUM or
something else is better suited I would love to know.

Also the guides and tutorial that I found did not touch on specifics for a
situation like this, if anyone knows of one I would be interested in reading
it.

Thanks,
Justin

On 5/1/07, Erik Anderson <erikerik@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> At work, I have 4 branch offices at which I've deployed asterisk.
> Call termination/origination at each branch office is handled either
> through a frac PRI or 3rd party SIP provider.  Soon, I'll be replacing
> the legacy PBX at our HQ with asterisk.
>
> Each branch office has between 3 and 20 employees, each with their own
> extension and DID, and at headquarters, we have about 70 people, again
> each with their own extensions and DID.
>
> Handling local and LD calls from all the offices isn't a big deal -
> just normal call routing for that.  My main question is what to do
> with calls between the offices.  Each branch is connected back to HQ
> with a persistant VPN tunnel - I've tested IAX2 traffic over these
> tunnels before, and things work great.  Since this works fairly well,
> I envision using IAX trunks for all intra-office calls.  So - in this
> situation, would it be easier to just manage the office dialplan(s)
> and call routing manually, or would it be worth it to set up dundi for
> extension discovery?
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Erik Anderson
> http://andersonfam.org
> _______________________________________________
> --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com --
>
> asterisk-users mailing list
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>    http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
>


-- 
Justin
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Erik,

Your setup is very similar to one of my own, and I started of manually
configuring it, creating IAX connections for each site and then using dial
plan to route the call. When I looked at Dundi and finally got it working, I
have one IAX connection for all sites and the connections are dynamically
created. My dial plan also got simpler, as I add sites I add them to Dundi
and the dial plan routes all unmatched extensions to Dundi for lookup. For
me dundi has reduced the complexity of my dial plan and I have a pair of
servers that query everybody and the that pair listed at my remote sites. I
am not using it for least cost routing, yet, but so far it has made things a
little easier. You might take a look at the article on txaug.net, under
hubguru's articles, it is from JR's Astricon 2006 session.

On 5/1/07, Erik Anderson <erikerik@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> At work, I have 4 branch offices at which I've deployed asterisk.
> Call termination/origination at each branch office is handled either
> through a frac PRI or 3rd party SIP provider.  Soon, I'll be replacing
> the legacy PBX at our HQ with asterisk.
>
> Each branch office has between 3 and 20 employees, each with their own
> extension and DID, and at headquarters, we have about 70 people, again
> each with their own extensions and DID.
>
> Handling local and LD calls from all the offices isn't a big deal -
> just normal call routing for that.  My main question is what to do
> with calls between the offices.  Each branch is connected back to HQ
> with a persistant VPN tunnel - I've tested IAX2 traffic over these
> tunnels before, and things work great.  Since this works fairly well,
> I envision using IAX trunks for all intra-office calls.  So - in this
> situation, would it be easier to just manage the office dialplan(s)
> and call routing manually, or would it be worth it to set up dundi for
> extension discovery?
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Erik Anderson
> http://andersonfam.org
> _______________________________________________
> --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com --
>
> asterisk-users mailing list
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>    http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
>


-- 
Bruce Reeves
Nortex Networks
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DUndi or enum only make sense if you plan to move extentions dynamically
without having to touch you Asterisk configs or if you want to expose your
addressing to the outside world.

Personally, I would do it statically so you can avoid delays in processing
addressing especially - in the case of enum- if you dns server becomes
unavailable.

--------------------------------------------------
Salvatore Giudice
Salvatore.Giudice@VoIPSecurityTraining.com

VoIP Security Training, LLC
http://VoIPSecurityTraining.com

848 N. Rainbow Blvd. #1676
Las Vegas, NV 89107
Phone: (617) 959-7625
Fax: (214) 279-2906


-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Erik Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 12:47 PM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: [asterisk-users] is dundi worth pursuing in this situation?

At work, I have 4 branch offices at which I've deployed asterisk.
Call termination/origination at each branch office is handled either
through a frac PRI or 3rd party SIP provider.  Soon, I'll be replacing
the legacy PBX at our HQ with asterisk.

Each branch office has between 3 and 20 employees, each with their own
extension and DID, and at headquarters, we have about 70 people, again
each with their own extensions and DID.

Handling local and LD calls from all the offices isn't a big deal -
just normal call routing for that.  My main question is what to do
with calls between the offices.  Each branch is connected back to HQ
with a persistant VPN tunnel - I've tested IAX2 traffic over these
tunnels before, and things work great.  Since this works fairly well,
I envision using IAX trunks for all intra-office calls.  So - in this
situation, would it be easier to just manage the office dialplan(s)
and call routing manually, or would it be worth it to set up dundi for
extension discovery?

Thanks!

-- 
Erik Anderson
http://andersonfam.org
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com --

asterisk-users mailing list
To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
   http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users

> At work, I have 4 branch offices at which I've deployed asterisk.
> Call termination/origination at each branch office is handled either
> through a frac PRI or 3rd party SIP provider.  Soon, I'll be replacing
> the legacy PBX at our HQ with asterisk.
>
> Each branch office has between 3 and 20 employees, each with their own
> extension and DID, and at headquarters, we have about 70 people, again
> each with their own extensions and DID.
>
> Handling local and LD calls from all the offices isn't a big deal -
> just normal call routing for that.  My main question is what to do
> with calls between the offices.  Each branch is connected back to HQ
> with a persistant VPN tunnel - I've tested IAX2 traffic over these
> tunnels before, and things work great.  Since this works fairly well,
> I envision using IAX trunks for all intra-office calls.  So - in this
> situation, would it be easier to just manage the office dialplan(s)
> and call routing manually, or would it be worth it to set up dundi for
> extension discovery?
Erik,

What you have to ask yourself; is this environment dynamic, frequent
changes, adding, deleting DID, extensions, then DUNDi will do better
than static dialplans.  If the setup will be pretty much the same
day-in and day-out, not much change or activity, then static dialplans
may be better.  I like to think of what would be easiest to
troubleshoot and repair when a problem occurs.  Static would also be
pretty easy if you can route summarize, i.e. office 1 had all 3XXX
office 2 has all 4XXX, office 3 has all 5XXX, and DID are prefixed
with different NPA/NXX.

DUNDi adds a layer of complexity but can give you great flexibility
for growth and scalability, once it's up and running it just works.  I
would not use it because it's the techie thing to do, I would use it
because I have an ever changing environment and truly need dynamic
extension & DID routing between remote locations/servers.

Hope this helps.  Sorry if it's clear as mud.

Good Luck

JR

-- 
JR Richardson
Engineering for the Masses