[asterisk-users] How to run a remote PHP script and still have access to audio stream?

[Leo Burd]

Hello David,

Thanks so much for your message!

Please check my comments inline below...


David Backeberg wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 9:54 PM, Leo Burd <leob at media.mit.edu> wrote:
>   
>> Hello there,
>>
>> I'm trying to figure out how to run a PHP script on a remote machine and
>> still have access to the audio stream associated with the call.
>>
>> Ideally, I'd love to play/record audio files directly from/to the remote
>> server without having to copy them back and forth to the Asterisk
>> server.  What is the best way to do this?
>>
>> Is it possible to combine EAGI with FastAGI in PHP?
>>     
>
> You don't specify how often / what proportion of the recordings need
> to be on a remote machine versus on the asterisk server. So you have
> two main things going on:
>
> 1) recordings, with a side order of distributing those to another machine
> 2) remote shell scripting
>
> First, the recordings can be done directly on a channel where the call
> is taking place. If this is one call, that's not so bad, but there get
> to be I/O contention issues when you try to record 'a lot' of calls
> simultaneously. Some people endorse working around that by writing
> recordings to a ramdisk, and then occasionally flushing those off to a
> real hard disk.
>   
What would be the "asterisk way" of recording part of the call from a 
remote server?  I'm not sure I can do that (the remote connection) with 
EAGI, can I? 
> You may prefer an alternate approach, which is that taken by
> commercial recording solutions. Oreka (which can be grabbed from
> sourceforge), and pretty much every commercial voip recording solution
> I've investigated, works by having you use libpcap (used in
> Ethereal/Wireshark) to watch ethernet device(s) where voip calls are
> taking place, grab the SIP headers that set up the RTP stream, and
> then write those recordings to disk on a dedicated recordings server.
> This requires explicit ethernet support by doing things like port
> mirroring, or using an old-school hub, etc. This has an advantage for
> you of providing a way to do recording directly on a machine that is
> NOT the asterisk server. No copying required as the recording is
> already where you want it.
>
> Second, the remote shell isn't so hard. ssh with keys, problem solved.
> You can do that directly from the asterisk dialplan using the System()
> command. This let's you tie the remote shell directly to a given call,
> where you can tune arguments accordingly.
>   
Do you know of any examples that use ssh from inside Asterisk calls?  
How much control do the ssh processes have over the call, if any?  Is 
that comparable to Fast_AGI?  Or EAGI?
> Of course, you can also do #1 with scripting and remote shell, or
> rsync with keys. If you don't need 'a lot' of simultaneous channels
> recorded, this may be more straightforward. You only have to learn
> asterisk, rather than asterisk and Oreka.
>   

I'm intrigued about the remote shell idea...  please let me know if you 
have additional information about it, ok?

Thanks once again,

Leo