[asterisk-dev] Understanding Voicemail Storage

[Race Vanderdecken]

As one who has lost hair over this stuff, the voicemail reordering, you
are stepping into foul things.

While there have been fixes to app_voicemail lately that help; one of
the things you will need to watch out for is the mysterious lost/extra
.txt file that gets left behind in
/var/spool/asterisk/voicemail/../INBOX sometimes on larger user systems.

What happens, and I still don't know why, is that the sound files are
all there with there buddy .txt files, but sometimes there is an extra
.txt file with no sound files. Kills the voicemail, and causes users to
rant.

Personal research tends to say that something is wrong when two or more
people are "in" the same mailbox at the same time.

Say the owner is listening to his emails and deleting them, but people
are also leaving voicemails in the same mailbox in very complicated
ways. This seems to cause extra .txt files to be orphaned in the INBOX.

But since vm uses the .txt files and not the sound files to run the vm
app when an orphan is hit by the system, well it causes users to rant
and thus causes heartaches for the customer support guy.

I don't have a fix, just something to be aware of when you have to deal
with the renumbering issue.  (I am currently working to find the problem
and fix it though; the current fix is to kill off the orphan files if
they are found by app_voicemail. The real magic is to discover why they
get orphaned in the first place.)

Good luck, and check ROR, Ruby on Rails.

Race Vanderdecken
Code Tyrant
race at codetyrant.com
828 221 2636 vonage
828 699 2361 cel
Somewhere near Asheville, NC.
 

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Arnd Vehling
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 2:13 AM
To: Asterisk Dev
Subject: [asterisk-dev] Understanding Voicemail Storage

Hi,

i am writing an (open source) abstraction layer to access and manipulate
asterisk voicemails using http and outputting the results in xml.

Right now i am trying to understand how exactly the physical voicemail
storage system works: First, app_voicemail locks the complete directory
when manipulating or inserting a voicemail. A new or moved voicemail
is always created as "msg0000.*" and all older messages are renumbered
accordingly. If any "holes" (i.e. msg00000, msg00001, msg00003) in the 
numbering system are discovered app_voicemails renumbers the files too.
After the insertion/renumbering process is complete app_voicemail will
remove the directory lock.

Can someone confirm that i understood this correctly and if neccessary
correct me where i am wrong?

thx & best regards,

   Arnd
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com --

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