[asterisk-users] Voicemail on Different Server

[Eric Germann]

How do you handle transfering vmail from one user to another when they're on
separate servers?

I'm using the single vmail server, mounted NFS partition for this right now.
I'd love to be able to have them standalone so they're survivable when the
WAN collapses, but I haven't figured out transfer.

EKG
 

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Noah Miller
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2007 2:15 PM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Voicemail on Different Server

Hi Steve -

> 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.

Yeah, I thought I had found the silver bullet with MySQL replication (the
users do float between offices, so it seemed perfect).  There were a number
of problems, but in the end it was table corruption as a result of the
replication process that made me drop this solution.

At the time I set this up, MySQL replication was really designed for one-way
replication.  Two way replication was possible, but required somewhat
unorthodox methods.  (Maybe this has changed, I don't know).
Configuration is also a little tricky.  It's not too bad to set it up
between two machines, but 3 machines is more tricky, and 4 is even more
tricky, etc, etc.  This client had only 3 offices at the time, but I knew
they would be expanding.  They now have 6.

Anyway, after getting everything working, I found that replication would
periodically stop after some time.  I'd have to re-create the setup, and
then replication would work for a time, and then stop again later.  This
occurred across several different version of MySQL.  I suppose I could have
fixed this issue with persistence, but unfortunately this was only an
annoyance compared to the major issue of data corruption.

When replication worked, it was inevitable that after a time the voicemail
storage table would experience data corruption.  Asterisk did not handle
this gracefully at all.  It was effectively a total DOS.  This also occurred
across several versions of MySQL.  Sometimes I was able to repair the
tables, but usually I couldn't, and the users ended up losing quit a lot of
voicemails.

I did not have the ability to spend the amount of time I needed to fix the
issue, so I scrapped the whole setup.  Regular local voicemail storage has
been flawless in all installations I've administered.


- Noah
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