[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk crashes from time to time

[Rich Adamson]

> we have 3 Asterisk boxes running under Fedora Core 2. Every box
> hangs/crashes from time to time.
> These installations are image based, means we made an image from our
> testserver with an image tool, which is able to manage ext3 partitions and
> deployed it to different server hardware.
> These servers run very stable and I could not find any failures in the logs.
> As these crashes appeared the first time, I thought rebooting these machines
> by cronjob every night at 04:00 would solve the problems. It seemed to work
> quite well for a couple of weeks. Today I saw our own asterisk production
> server crash :-( .
> These crashes are always the same, asterisk stops responding, the cli does
> not give any reaction on command input, you have to manually kill -9 all
> asterisk and moh processes.
> Asterisk logs are empty.
> 
> We don't use any isdn/fxs/fxo/e1/t1 cards in these servers.
> Our connections to PSTN is only made by Patton/Inalp SmartNode Gateways,
> connected to asterisk via sip protocol.
> Scince these crashes appear on three servers with different hardware, and
> the main installation is always the same, I would think there are "only" two
> possible sources to find the failure:
> 
> Operating System Fedora Core 2 Kernel 2.6.8-1.521
> Asterisk CVS-HEAD-01/08/05
> 
> Has anybody out there similar problems, and if yes, how did he fix them?
> Is there any working solution, having asterisk control itself perhaps by
> using a script that drops a test call in /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing and if
> this call wasn't processed successfull the script stops all running asterisk
> and moh processes and restarts asterisk?

Far too many variables for anyone to even guess at the root cause. Problem
could be related to slight differences in o/s libraries between systems, 
coding problems within asterisk, etc.

There were some issues reported with cvs head in January relative to hangs,
etc.

Might consider changing /etc/asterisk/logger.conf and add debug to the list.
Then after a failure, at least look at /var/log/asterisk/debug messages.

For additional info, I'd suggest compiling the code on one of thse machines
to see if it complains about missing/inappropriate items.