[asterisk-users] Voicemail on Different Server

[Noah Miller]

Hi Forest -

> I have two seperate systems at two different locations.  Each hosts
> there own voicemail for their phones.
> I have thought about just having all voicemail on one server.  Is the
> best way to do this just through a dial app?
>
> Can anyone think of draw backs to this?  One I can think of is I will
> have to specify a extension to redirect 0 (for receptionist) back to
> the Site A server.  I will also have to redirect all directory apps to
> the voicemail server.

The first time I set up a multi-site Asterisk, I tried to do
centralized voicemail.  My only real motivation for it was to have a
centralized directory.  I originally did the NFS-mount method.  If the
internet connection ever went down at the non-central offices there
were two problems 1) users didn't have access to their voicemail, 2)
asterisk did not handle the situation gracefully.  I believe asterisk
will now handle the situation gracefully, but users still won't be
able to get their voicemail.

This was not acceptable to me or to the client, so I changed to
storing the voicemail via ODBC on MySQL.  Each server had it's own
local storage, and then MySQL replicated the databases between the
sites.  This setup was terribly finicky and unstable.  It was much
worse than the NFS mount.  I quickly gave it up.

My eventual solution for this client was to store voicemail locally at
each site.  For the centralized directory, I just wrote a quick shell
script to rsync the voicemail.conf file and all personal greetings
between all the servers.  Cron runs this script periodically to keep
all the asterisk servers up to date.  This solution is MUCH better.
It's been very stable and reliable.

There's now another option - you can store the messages on a central
IMAP server.  That may work for you.  I haven't done this setup yet,
but I believe if you wanted the centralized directory, you'd still
need to do something like an rsync script between various asterisk
servers.


- Noah



On 4/27/07, Anthony Rodgers <Anthony_Rodgers at dnv.org> wrote:
> mount -o intr,nolock ought to do the trick..... we're using those
> options now, but thankfully haven't had reason to find out if they work
> or not yet.....
>
> CP
>
> Doug Garstang wrote:
> > No, you can get Asterisk and NFS to work fine together. It was in my
> > past job, so I can't remember the exact settings, but there was some
> > magic combination of NFS client mount settings that would cause
> > Asterisk to return immediately, rather than hang, if there was an NFS
> > communications problem.
> >
> > Doug.
> >
> >
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