[asterisk-dev] Asterisk Beacon Module Proposal

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 09:37:37PM -0500, Matthew Jordan wrote:
> On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 4:54 PM, Rodrigo Ramírez Norambuena
> <decipher.hk at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 11:49:39AM -0400, Moises Silva wrote:
> >> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:35 PM, Matthew Jordan <mjordan at digium.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Hey everyone -
> >> >
> >> > At the past several AstriDevCon events, we've had an open discussion
> >> > about adding a module to Asterisk that would gather anonymous usage
> >> > statistics. Said module would be used to help the Asterisk Developer
> >> > community better support the users of Asterisk, as we would have some
> >> > indication of the modules being used by the reporting segment of the
> >> > Asterisk community.
> >>
> >>
> >> Is there a need for this to be an Asterisk module itself and not an
> >> external monitoring service/agent collecting (e.g via AMI) and pushing the
> >> stats? I'm just thinking this is not the kind of thing that *needs* to be
> >> in a C module. It'd be sad to have your Asterisk system crashing or
> >> misbehaving because of a bug in the beacon module.
> 
> There's a few issues with doing it outside of Asterisk:
> 
> 1) Not all of the data you may want to retrieve may be readily
> available. Granted, right now, I don't think that's the case, but
> there's certainly more flexibility if you have access to Asterisk's C
> APIs.
> 
> 2) There's no real way to guarantee that someone will run a daemon
> next to Asterisk, or that said daemon won't have some other
> interaction that we won't expect. The only way I can think of to
> reasonably introduce such a daemon is to make it part of the Asterisk
> 'install' target, and/or add it to packages. I'm not sure if having a
> separate daemon spin up suddenly on someone's system, with no
> warnings, would be much better.

IMHO, the real problem is with the sending part, not with the collecting
part. If you don't trust asterisk, don't run it.

So how about a module that collects data and, on request, dumps it for
sending?

This will be done by a simple cron job (asterisk -rx; wget) that is
simple to inspect.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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