[asterisk-users] Is Asterisk really good??

[Mike Trest - On Travel]

>-----Original Message-----
> >>
> >> I'd be interested in sections like "Rolling out a new server" or "How we
> >> maintain all the little configuration files without losing our sanity."

Hi,

I will contribute my 2-cents on how I maintained consistency on  a 
large application
with 64 +  Asterisks that all had to have the same config and links back to
a central DB.

Whenever we needed a new machine, we just

         We had a master source location.with a master image
         We cloned the hard drive with linux  dd copy of master image
         boot the new machine with this disk
         assign appropriate IP address
         perform some sanity checks prior to shipping
         Send either disk or full machine to remote COLO for physical install.

After the machine came on line, it would have enough configuration to
join the other members of the farm of asterisks.

For intermediate updates, we used SSL-DSA keys between the master
master image machine and each of the 64+ remotes.  We would wrote
our own script and gave it a list of each machine on which to perform
the particular steps.  When it was launched, we just went out to lunch
or home at night while the remotes were updated.

This application had as many as 6,000 simultaneous call running and
we wrote the scripts such that each remote were placed in a
"take no calls" status by the script so we did not kill any active traffic.

We found that no "canned package" was useful to do this because each
maintenance cycle was addressing a different part of the overall configuration
and had slightly different commands that were needed.

Any good script writer can do the same for what you described.

Regards,  ..mike..