[asterisk-users] Call Recording Servers

[Steve Totaro]

Matthew J. Roth wrote:
> Tom Lynn wrote:
>> You could also look at Oreka at sourceforge.
> Tom,
>
> We are moving in that direction, but we don't have it in production 
> yet.  Since it is a packet sniffing solution, the limiting factor 
> becomes the point at which the kernel starts to drop an unacceptable 
> number of packets.  A PF_RING <www.ntop.org/PF_RING.html> enabled 
> version of libpcap can help to raise this point.  There's some pretty 
> sophisticated buffering going on, but it's still a good idea to 
> dedicate a fast disk (or RAID) to writing the recordings.
>
> Keep in mind that Oreka aims to do one thing, while Asterisk is a sort 
> of VOIP Swiss Army knife.  If all you want to do is record calls, 
> Oreka is a good candidate.  On the other hand, Asterisk will give you 
> call recording along with a plethora of other features.
>
> Oreka's main developer is extremely skilled, helpful, and responsive.  
> As far as dimensioning Oreka, here is a quote from him:
>
> "What I can say is that we do have a customer recording 200 concurrent
> conversations without drops under Linux FC4 with the following server
> (Desktop hardware actually):
> Dell Dimension 9200
> IntelR  CoreTM 2 Duo Processor E6300 (2MB L2 Cache,1.86GHz,1066)
> 1 Gig of RAM Dual-Channel DDR2 SDRAM (533MHz)
> 1 x 80 Gig SATA II drive
> 1 x 300 Gig SATA I drive
>
> And this is without PF_RING or anything else, so I would be surprised 
> if we
> could not push this further."
>
> Good day,
>
> Matthew Roth
> InterMedia Marketing Solutions
> Software Engineer and Systems Developer
>
That customer would be me, so I can confirm that the dimensioning quoted 
above it totally correct.  The server has since been upgraded to a real 
server (HP DL380 with dual 3ghz Xeons) and not a Dell Desktop.  It was 
just proof of concept and passed with flying colors (for $550, it made a 
great testing box, now it is my HTPC ;-))

You can use the conf files to filter traffic based on IPs.  With some 
creative Cisco port mirroring magic and filters, you can be sure to only 
capture "interesting traffic" rather than two legs of a call and things 
like that.  You could probably push past 200 concurrent calls but I am 
not sure I would do it myself.  I would opt for more servers.

Thanks,
Steve Totaro