[asterisk-users] Managing complex setups with Asterisk

[Paul Belanger]

On 12-11-07 05:41 AM, martin f krafft wrote:
> Hello,
>
> we are finally going to redesign our Asterisk-Setup, which has grown
> quite complex. We have five sites with a total of 400 users, 15 SIP
> registrations and 3 IAX registrations. We do not use any
> VoIP-hardware, so it's all software-based. But we make heavy use of
> features, including voicemail, followme, conferencing,
> call-recording, and queuing.
>
> As I said, the configuration has grown quite complex — so complex
> that we are all a bit scared to touch it. It works, but as we are
> now adding a sixth site and upgrading the hardware, we thought it
> would be a good opportunity to get the sixth site up and running on
> a new box, then migrate the other sites.
>
> Now we are trying to figure out how to organise sip.conf, iax.conf
> and extensions.conf. I read about Realtime configuration, but I was
> a bit disappoointed because it's really just moving the
> section-key-value store from the flat files to a relational
> database without really making use of any relational features. Sure,
> it's realtime thereafter, but not any less complex.
>
> So what to do? Does anyone have a similar setup and would like to
> offer a glance into their configs? Are there best practices? Or is
> there maybe even software (Linux) to manage setups?
>
What is your point of pain? Right now we do most of the configuration, 
provisioning, and system management outside of asterisk.

So, for example here is how we handle the initial configuration and 
provisioning, we use puppet[1]. Leif and I did a talk at astricon[2] 
about it.

System management is another issue, but we mostly use puppet or external 
agi / database to control certain _dynamic_ features.

Either way, don't manually build your 6th machine.  Start from fresh 
using some sort of automated tool (chef / puppet).  This will help you 
get on the right path.

[1] https://github.com/kickstandproject/astricon-2012-presentation
[2] http://goo.gl/T8lJR

-- 
Paul Belanger | PolyBeacon, Inc.
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