[asterisk-biz] Recent REMOTE CRASH BUG

[Joshua Colp]

I'll tackle this one by one...

Matt wrote:
> Goodness no :)   But my point is.. little things like... in version 
> 1.2.6 or 7 maybe?  I don't remember exact version #.  Hitting * while on 
> a call from a queue would disconnect it, even if you were using 
> agentcallbacklogin.   Version 1.0.9 had a memory leak where if it wasn't 
> restarted every night it would eventually just lock up.

Were bug reports filed for this? We can only try to fix bugs if they are 
reported. This is one of the issues we face lots of times. An individual 
talks about a bug but when you ask them "did you file a bug report?" 
they say no.

> To my knowledge, even with current versions of Asterisk, if you hit the 
> Manager interface too hard it will make it start to act funny.

Effort has been put in to change how Manager is handled. Manager in 1.4 
and trunk is not like it was in 1.2.

> At least in 1.2.6 and 7 if some of your SIP peers were down (that you 
> registered with).. and by down I mean their DNS entries didn't 
> exist...(no DNS resolution for them for whatever reason), when you 
> started Asterisk it would start but not give you sip or zap command 
> options until it finished timing out all of your SIP peers!!!!

Asterisk does not have a non-blocking DNS resolver. This means that when 
a DNS lookup is in progress it block until finished. If your DNS servers 
are down this will make Asterisk go funky and cause it to hang while the 
DNS lookup times out.

> My points is not that I would rather use Microsoft at all.  Asterisk is 
> a really great product and we have it in use at many locations, but I 
> get kind of annoyed that every version seems to have more bugs in it 
> that keep it from being usable.

Have you looked and seen how many bugs were fixed? I count 33 changes 
between 1.2.15 and 1.2.16, and that was within the oldest currently 
maintained branch with 1.2.15 being released less then a month ago.

I also count 350 changes between 1.4.0 and 1.4.1 with 1.4.0 being 
released 2 and a half months ago.

If you are having issues and they seem to be a bug, file a report and as 
you can see above it'll probably get fixed. Just remember we are human 
and there are only so many people.

> My point with bringing Dan Bernstein into all this is that QMail has had 
> NO security holes found in it, and has had NO bug fixes since version 
> 1.03 came out.   Yes there is a 1.05, but that is to fix a GCC issue... 
> not a QMail issue.  
> 
> Is there a reason Digium can't do a bit better QA on the source before 
> releasing it as 'stable'?
> 

It's impossible to test every situation and every scenario that a user 
can use Asterisk for.

What may be common for you to use Asterisk for may not be what everyone 
else uses it for.

Joshua Colp
Software Developer
Digium, Inc.