[asterisk-users] Managing complex setups with Asterisk

[Joshua Colp]

martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Joshua Colp<jcolp at digium.com>  [2012.11.07.1831 +0100]:
>> Peer names have to be distinct, this is just a fundamental design
>> element of chan_sip. What a lot of people end up doing is instead of
>> treating peers as people they treat them as devices. The peer name
>> becomes the MAC address of the device they have been assigned.
>
> Especially in combination with users.conf, this can become quite
> cumbersome.
>
> Also, it solves the sip.conf problem, but in extensions.conf, your
> contexts still need to encode the locality/domain, e.g.
> [site1-phones], [site2-outgoing] and [incoming-to-site3]. This is
> all doable, with prefixes and #includes, but it requires more
> discipline than if Asterisk would simply learn to virtually host. ;)

"Simply" doesn't cover the amount of work required to do that. Months 
would be required most likely. It's not a worthwhile investment when it 
can be done like above right now. It's essentially pushing the 
responsibility and burden away from the user of Asterisk to the 
developers of Asterisk, and over the years I've only heard from 
approximately three people who really wanted that ^_^. I'm not saying it 
wouldn't be nice for some people, but it's just not feasible 'nor 
something a vast majority want like you have expressed.

> Also, when users have multiple devices, then handing out two sets of
> credentials is a bit of a pain. I realise that this is not specific
> to your suggestion, but I do recall a university using Asterisk that
> provided 10 logins for everyone, i.e. if my username was 12345, then
> 12345[0-9] would all be valid SIP login names using the same
> password. Any idea how this was done? 10 stanzas? ;)

Yes, or they had a SIP registrar in front which allowed multiple AORs 
(registrations) per account. This is another design limitation in the 
way chan_sip has been written.

Cheers,

-- 
Joshua Colp
Digium, Inc. | Senior Software Developer
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at:  www.digium.com  & www.asterisk.org