[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk and SER for Call Center Application

[BJ Weschke]

 It's very doable.

 I did a presentation of a case study on this exact solution at
Astricon last month.

 Contact me off list for the slides.

On 11/3/05, Waldo Rubinstein <waldo at trianet.net> wrote:
> I suppose the * and SER topic has been discussed way too much, but I
> searching through all the archives, I haven't really found an answer
> to what I think could be done.
>
> I would like to setup a set of asterisk servers with identical
> configuration files so that a SER machine can load balance the
> traffic to, say, 3 asterisk servers. The idea is that if one asterisk
> server fails, the other servers will take over without having to
> change any configuration settings. Obviously all the active
> registrations and channels in the failed server will be lost, but at
> least the UAs can automatically reregister.
>
> The problem that I have with this is that say I have a UA SIP/1001
> that registers on Asterisk Server 1. When SER receives a call for SIP/
> 1001,  all three asterisk servers know about SIP/1001 because it's
> configured in their sip.conf. However, the UA SIP/1001 is currently
> logged in asterisk server 1. How does SER know which server to send
> the actual call to? Could I do something like a broadcast of the call
> so that all three asterisk servers try to reach the UA and whichever
> answers answers? What happens if the two asterisk servers which
> received a request and could not reach the UA send the caller to
> voicemail, while the call is actually established in server 1 (may be
> I don't know enough about SIP)?
>
> What I'm trying to achieve is the following. In addition to the three
> asterisk servers, I would setup a central queueing server with
> asterisk. Say, UA SIP/1001 is registered in asterisk server 1. When
> the agent on SIP/1001 logs into the queue (possibly via AGI script),
> the UA will be added to the central queueing server instead of the
> server the UA is actually registered. Now the central queueing server
> knows that SIP/1001 is ready to take calls from a queue. Going back
> to my previous paragraph, when the central queueing server needs to
> send a call to SIP/1001, it will do so through the SER server. That
> way, SER can take care of locating (or broadcasting) the call to SIP/
> 1001, regardless of which server the agent is actually registered in.
> This would allow me to have multiple asterisk servers handling all
> our queue calls.
>
> Why would I want to use asterisk for servers 1,2,3 instead of just
> SER and the single asterisk queueing server? We have many agents in
> different geographic locations and we need to have all calls
> recorded. This would allow us to have a distributed architecture of
> asterisk servers where each server would "Monitor" each agent's call
> instead of trying to fine tune so many different details in order to
> achieve "512 simultaneous calls being recorded".
>
> Am I dreaming? Is this conceptually crazy or is it doable? Can
> someone point me in the right direction? I have some time in my hands
> and if someone gives me some pointers, I guess I could try to tackle
> a small lab environment to simulate this.
>
> Thanks,
> Waldo
> _______________________________________________
> --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com --
>
> Asterisk-Users mailing list
> Asterisk-Users at lists.digium.com
> http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>   http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
>