[asterisk-users] Newbie Asterisk: Install Asterisk as non-root

[James Sneeringer]

On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 06:32:30PM -0500, James Sneeringer wrote:
>> The safe_asterisk script monitors the actual asterisk process, and if
>> it dies for some reason,
>
> Not "for some reason". For instyance, if asterisk decides to die the
> script should not restart it. And if it got a SIGTERM? (e.g.: from init
> on shutdown?)

True, I oversimplified a bit. I should have said it restarts Asterisk
if it dies abnormally (e.g. with a return code of anything other than
zero). Init shouldn't have to kill it if the startup script can also
shut it down cleanly (which in my case on Ubuntu means stopping
safe_asterisk first).

> Also note that asterisk.conf options override command-line options (and
> not the other way around, as you might have learned to expect from most
> other applications).

Some asterisk.conf options, such as runuser and rungroup, don't appear
to work at all. I can get Asterisk to run non-root using -U and -G on
the command line, but attempting to do it in asterisk.conf instead
doesn't work for me. The command line is good enough for me, so I
haven't taken the time to figure out why it doesn't work.

> Question: what does it take to move the voicemail file from
> /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf to /etc/asterisk/writble/voicemail.conf ?
>
> Patch voicemail.conf and leave a compatibility symlink for the others?

Yes, you would have to patch those two applications. The filename
itself is hardcoded into app_voicemail.c and app_directory.c. It picks
up the path from "astetcdir" in asterisk.conf, or uses /etc/asterisk
if that option is not defined. A simple symlink isn't good enough
because when Asterisk rewrites the config file (after a user changes
their passcode), it unlinks the old one without checking whether it's
a symlink it needs to dereference. I haven't looked too deeply into
the code, so I don't know if it's as simple as changing the
VOICEMAIL_CONFIG to "subdir/voicemail.conf".

-James