asterisk users - Nov 2012 - Managing complex setups with Asterisk

Hello,

we are finally going to redesign our Asterisk-Setup, which has grown
quite complex. We have five sites with a total of 400 users, 15 SIP
registrations and 3 IAX registrations. We do not use any
VoIP-hardware, so it's all software-based. But we make heavy use of
features, including voicemail, followme, conferencing,
call-recording, and queuing.

As I said, the configuration has grown quite complex ? so complex
that we are all a bit scared to touch it. It works, but as we are
now adding a sixth site and upgrading the hardware, we thought it
would be a good opportunity to get the sixth site up and running on
a new box, then migrate the other sites.

Now we are trying to figure out how to organise sip.conf, iax.conf
and extensions.conf. I read about Realtime configuration, but I was
a bit disappoointed because it's really just moving the
section-key-value store from the flat files to a relational
database without really making use of any relational features. Sure,
it's realtime thereafter, but not any less complex.

So what to do? Does anyone have a similar setup and would like to
offer a glance into their configs? Are there best practices? Or is
there maybe even software (Linux) to manage setups?

Cheers,

-- 
martin | http://madduck.net/ | http://two.sentenc.es/
 
"not the truth in whose possession any man is, or thinks he is, but
 the honest effort he has made to find out the truth, is what
 constitutes the worth of man."
                                                   -- gotthold lessing
 
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Can Asterisk do virtual hosting? While I want/need the sites to be
hosted by the same instance (so that e.g. calls can be transferred
easily), I don't want to have to name my peers [site1-john], and
I want people to be able to SIP-dial john at site1.example.org and
john at site2.example.org and trust that Asterisk knows what to do.

Thanks,

-- 
martin | http://madduck.net/ | http://two.sentenc.es/
 
"the human brain is like an enormous fish --
 it is flat and slimy
 and has gills through which it can see."
                                                       -- monty python
 
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On 12-11-07 05:41 AM, martin f krafft wrote:
> Hello,
>
> we are finally going to redesign our Asterisk-Setup, which has grown
> quite complex. We have five sites with a total of 400 users, 15 SIP
> registrations and 3 IAX registrations. We do not use any
> VoIP-hardware, so it's all software-based. But we make heavy use of
> features, including voicemail, followme, conferencing,
> call-recording, and queuing.
>
> As I said, the configuration has grown quite complex ? so complex
> that we are all a bit scared to touch it. It works, but as we are
> now adding a sixth site and upgrading the hardware, we thought it
> would be a good opportunity to get the sixth site up and running on
> a new box, then migrate the other sites.
>
> Now we are trying to figure out how to organise sip.conf, iax.conf
> and extensions.conf. I read about Realtime configuration, but I was
> a bit disappoointed because it's really just moving the
> section-key-value store from the flat files to a relational
> database without really making use of any relational features. Sure,
> it's realtime thereafter, but not any less complex.
>
> So what to do? Does anyone have a similar setup and would like to
> offer a glance into their configs? Are there best practices? Or is
> there maybe even software (Linux) to manage setups?
>
What is your point of pain? Right now we do most of the configuration, 
provisioning, and system management outside of asterisk.

So, for example here is how we handle the initial configuration and 
provisioning, we use puppet[1]. Leif and I did a talk at astricon[2] 
about it.

System management is another issue, but we mostly use puppet or external 
agi / database to control certain _dynamic_ features.

Either way, don't manually build your 6th machine.  Start from fresh 
using some sort of automated tool (chef / puppet).  This will help you 
get on the right path.

[1] https://github.com/kickstandproject/astricon-2012-presentation
[2] http://goo.gl/T8lJR

-- 
Paul Belanger | PolyBeacon, Inc.
Jabber: paul.belanger at polybeacon.com | IRC: pabelanger (Freenode)
Github: https://github.com/pabelanger | Twitter: 
https://twitter.com/pabelanger

On 11/07/2012 02:16 PM, Johan Wilfer wrote:
> 2012-11-07 20:49, Jeff LaCoursiere skrev:
>> Just to chime in, if you REALLY want multi-tenant, it is super easy and
>> surprisingly efficient to use kernel level virtualization to run
>> multiple instances of asterisk (and even FreePBX).  We use LXC to do
>> this.  The "host" runs an instance that has the dahdi
hardware, drivers,
>> and upstream connections.  The "clients" have SIP connections
to the
>> host for all inbound/outbound, so you have a central place to
>> collect/process CDR records for billing.  Getting your phones to
connect
>> to each instance is an exercise for the network admin ;)
> Any quirks / observations you have running LXC? We run OpenVZ now with
> the same setup and it works very well. But as Debian will not support
> OpenVZ in the next version we are looking for alternate solutions..
>
> Do you run Dahdi run Dahdi for timing / meetme on both the "host"
(HN)
> and the "clients" (VE)?
>
> Distribution?
>
> Any other pitfalls or recommendations with LXC?
>
>
Since moving to Ubuntu 12.04 server, LXC mgmt has been much simpler and 
stable.  Had some troubles with Ubuntu 10, though that was our 
proof-of-concept, and mainly just with getting a template finalized.  
Shutting down a container, back then, was a scary and often fatal thing 
to do.  WIth 12.04 I have had zero LXC related issues in roughly six 
months.  Have a few dozen companies running on the platform and getting 
ready to white label the infrastructure to several resellers.  In our 
lab we have managed to get 200 instances, with FreePBX, running 
simultaneously (though idle) on one host. Each (optimized!) container 
seems to eat about 75M of RAM.  Our latest tweak is to make all of the 
containers internally addressed on an OpenVPN-only accessible virtual 
LAN, and are only distributing telephony hardware that can connect to 
the platform natively (still on a search for the right ATA, though 
getting by with DD-WRT router in front of Cisco ATA).

Cheers,

j