[asterisk-users] Managing complex setups with Asterisk

[Jeff LaCoursiere]

On 11/07/2012 01:06 PM, Joshua Colp wrote:
> 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,
>
Just to chime in, if you REALLY want multi-tenant, it is super easy and 
surprisingly efficient to use kernel level virtualization to run 
multiple instances of asterisk (and even FreePBX).  We use LXC to do 
this.  The "host" runs an instance that has the dahdi hardware, drivers, 
and upstream connections.  The "clients" have SIP connections to the 
host for all inbound/outbound, so you have a central place to 
collect/process CDR records for billing.  Getting your phones to connect 
to each instance is an exercise for the network admin ;)

Much simpler than working out multiple contexts, extension overlaps, 
etc., IMO.

j