[Asterisk-Users] high availibilty (heartbeats) - a good way to ensure automatic redundency?

[tim panton]

On 11 May 2005, at 21:20, David John Walsh wrote:

> being from a telecoms background, the thought of a single asterisk box
> solution (even in a low production environment of say <10 phones)
> worries me slightly!

Sure, and so it should, but not too much.
There is a complex trade off here, and you as you add
hardware and complexity you soon hit diminishing returns.

You really need to establish what an acceptable downtime would be
before you start down the HA route.

We are in a small office, we buy solid hardware, keep it
in a decent environment and keep backups, documentation and spares.

Our strategy in case of hardware failure is :
     1) get the phone co to redirect calls to our mobile phones.
     2) get the spare out of the cupboard, load the last known
good backup
     3) swap systems.
     4) test
     5) cancel the redirect.
Total down-time of ~ 30 mins probably.

For a big telesales office, this would be unacceptable, but
for us, frankly, the internet is more indispensable than the phones
these days.


Tim.