[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk Hardware Recommendation

[Matt Roth]

Daniel,

Could you expand upon your experience recording to an NFS mounted drive.

We are looking to use a TDM-VoIP gateway to route 16+ spans to a single 
Asterisk server.  We were hoping to Monitor using the following scheme:

- Monitor application executed on Asterisk server (no 'm' flag)
- Pick a codec that the Monitor application can record in natively so 
that no transcoding is done on the leg files (can this be done?)
- Record the leg files to an NFS mounted drive on a remote machine
- Have soxmix take care of mixing and transcoding the leg files into the 
desired format on the remote machine

According to you this now looks like a VERY BAD IDEA. 

Does anyone out there have any experience using monitor to digitally 
record large numbers of spans (16+) on a single Asterisk server using a 
VoIP gateway instead of TDM cards?  Is it feasible?  We are trying to 
keep the Asterisk server as slim as possible, but would like to stick to 
one box so that we can have centralized queuing, configuration, and 
reporting.

Has anyone had any luck using Monitor to record to an NFS mounted 
drive?  Are there any other options to remove the overhead of the disk 
subsystem when recording calls?

Thanks,

Matthew Roth
http://voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Running%20Asterisk%20on%20Debian

Daniel Salama wrote:

> Thank you again. I will definitely do that. By "cheaper" asterisk 
> servers, do you mean single-CPU machines that can handle Quad T1s and 
> still do the call monitoring?
>
> BTW, I tried the monitoring without the 'm' option and mounted the 
> audio directory via NFS. Big NO NO for everyone. Just do what Matt 
> says: copy the -in and -out to archive server separately several times 
> a day :) - don't record to NFS mounted drive.
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel
>
> On Apr 28, 2005, at 6:42 PM, mattf wrote:
>
>> I have never been able to do more than 50 concurrent recordings with 
>> Zap ->
>> SIP phone calls without the audio skipping and/or breaking up. Also, 
>> if you
>> are using Digium TE4XXP and want to do a lot of recording I would 
>> recommend
>> against a SCSI RAID card because of the interrupt conflicts that you 
>> will
>> run into over time. I would recommend a couple of cheaper Asterisk 
>> servers
>> with a dual T1 or Quad T1 board in them and SATA drives, with a nice big
>> archive server that the audio will be copied to several times a day. 
>> Also,
>> do not record(Monitor) with the 'm' flag on because this will also 
>> lead to
>> more disk read-write while you are already trying to write another 
>> 100 or so
>> streams. Offload the -in and -out files to the archive server and let it
>> soxmix them together instead. This is the method that we have settled 
>> on for
>> our 12 Asterisk servers and it works rather well for us.
>>
>> MATT---
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Daniel Salama [mailto:dsalama at user.net]
>> Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 5:56 PM
>> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
>> Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk Hardware Recommendation
>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been reading on the wiki as well as on this list, different
>> suggestions of what to look for when designing an asterisk server with
>> a lot of traffic. By "a lot" of traffic, I mean a box with a a TE4XXP,
>> that will be hit to full capacity (96 simultaneous calls). This box
>> will also deliver these calls to SIP users and record all their
>> conversations via Monitor.
>>
>> I've heard that it's not necessarily a matter of memory (RAM) nor the
>> need to have a multi-processor machine. But what really matters is that
>> the motherboard (architecture) is designed to handle such a high amount
>> of interrupts generated by the TE4XXP, the NIC, the storage array
>> (whether it's SCSI or IDE or SATA).
>>
>> Does anyone have experience with particular brands of either
>> motherboards they recommend are capable to handle this or complete
>> systems (e.g. Dell xxxx or whichever brands), that are ready for this?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Daniel
>>
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