[asterisk-users] What is your Backup Strategy?

[Yuan LIU]

>From: Alex Balashov <abalashov at evaristesys.com>
>Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:17:37 -0400 (EDT)
>
>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 are right.  It shouldn't be hard to just require the primary server to 
register with the backup, monitor this registration from backup; when 
Asterisk on primary fails, run a script to request primary to shutdown and 
take over.

Yuan Liu

>  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>
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