[asterisk-users] What is your Backup Strategy?

[Alex Balashov]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Forrest Beck said something to this effect:

> 1)  Using hearbeat and drbd to monitor the servers.  When the primary 
> fails the backup will assign itself the virtual ip used between the two, 
> and then mount the drbd disk which has the asterisk configs and 
> voicemail.  The biggest con to this is hearbeat just monitors a ping 
> response either over IP or a COM port.  So if the asterisk service dies, 
> heartbeat will not fail over.  Although I think there are work arounds 
> for this.  The newest version is suppose to have support for monitoring a 
> TCP port as well....

   This seems like a good approach, if you've got any stability and/or 
filesystem-related quirks ironed out -- I've heard of some.

   I don't know much about heartbeat, but I don't imagine it'd be hard to 
hack in a SIP polling event either internally or externally.  You could use 
SIP Swiss Army Knife (sipsak) or some other SIP testing tool to send a 
periodic OPTIONS ping to the SIP service and trigger a protection switch to 
the secondary server if it's down.  Even if you can't hack this into the 
heartbeat setup itself (can't it use external scripts for monitoring?),
you can certainly do something like run it on the primary server and
if the SIP service dies, enact a firewall rule that drops ICMP responses
and thus artificially trigger a failure.

-- Alex

--
Alex Balashov <sasha at presidium.org>