[Asterisk-Users] res_motv: Request for Comment

[asterisk at sasami.anime.net]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Mark Spencer wrote:
> I've been considering the nature of Asterisk, its security, the bug
> tracker, and more...  And i've come up with an interesting idea: A
> "message of the version".  The idea is that Asterisk has a compile time
> 32-bit unsigned int version which is incremented whenever some major new
> bug is fixed.  When Asterisk starts up (and periodically, maybe once per
> day), it sends a packet with the version number to a server at Digium,
> along with a message level (INFO,MINOR,MAJOR,CRITICAL) and the Digium
> server replies (if it receives the packet, if not, it might get sent again
> in a day) with any INFO, MINOR, MAJOR, or CRITICAL messages which are
> associated with that version of the code.  In this way, an asterisk
> administrator could easily see if there were any major issues, critical
> security updates, etc, that his system might need to be updated for.

This could easily be done with simple dns lookups and TXT records, eg do a 
TXT query for version#.digium.com.

The nice thing is that because of the distributed and cached nature of 
DNS, it is inherently resistant to high loads and outages -- especially if 
you have secondary/tertiary servers.

-Dan