[asterisk-dev] Distributed device states behavior when device names overlap between servers

[Russell Bryant]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 6:05 AM, Dimitris Kazakos <nemphys at gmail.com> wrote:
> Either I missed something important, or there is a design flaw in the
> distributed device states functionality:
>
> After struggling for a while, I managed to get 2 asterisk servers
> (inter-connected using an IAX trunk) connected to an Openfire XMPP server
> with the intention to share extension states between them (for blf usage).
> I first tried the Custom device suggested to be used as a test in the
> documentation (which is quite poor, btw) and all worked fine; the state was
> properly shared between the servers.

Now that you set it up, feel free to help with the documentation.

> The problem starts when the state sharing started for actual devices.
> After a little digging in the Openfire database/XMPP message logs  trying to
> see what was actually published, I realized that there are 2 things
> published with each state change: device name and state (along with the
> server eID) - good so far.
> The problem is that both servers have DAHDI fxs/fxo cards and therefore both
> servers have DAHDI/X devices. For those devices, the state is normally
> published using XMPP pubsub, but since the device names are the same in both
> servers (though the actual devices are different), when eg. device DAHDI/5
> on server 1 was in a call, the device state of DAHDI/5 on server 2 (using
> show hints) would change to "in-use".
> This of course is a deal breaker, as there are many devices that have the
> same name (custom DND, meetme, etc, actually all except sip/iax
> extensions/trunks).
>
> Am I missing something, or this issue has not been addressed yet?

You're right.  It's just that you're the first person that has found
this to be a problem.  I think most people are just using the states
of SIP devices.  Adding some options to limit what states get
published wouldn't be very hard.

-- 
Russell Bryant