[asterisk-users] Voicemail on Different Server

[Steve Totaro]

Noah Miller wrote:
> 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.
>> >
>> >
>>

Can you elaborate on this, "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."

This sounds like it would probably work the best, especially if you have 
users moving around between offices.  What was so "finicky" and 
"unstable" about it?  I am not one to quickly give up.  I have found 
that persistence pays off when the idea is sound.

Thanks,
Steve