[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk Redundency

[Adam Moffett]

>Hi,
>
>I wish to use Asterisk as a SIP server.
>How do I use Asterisk in a redundent network?
>So, if one Asterisk server fails, how does failover work?
>
>James
>
>  
>
James, I've been working on the same thing.  I think it's pretty 
important too because phone providers shoot for five-nine availablity, 
so people are pretty much accustomed to their phones just plain working 
all the time.  And if they don't work there's hell to pay.

I think the simplest way would be to use SIP adapters that allow you to 
specify a backup server.  I can't think of any off the top of my head, 
but I have definitely seen them.  Then you just need to keep the configs 
synchronized between your two servers (via rsync or what have you).  The 
problems of course are that it limits your options for SIP adapters, and 
you have to be in an evironment where you can control which SIP adapters 
people are using.

Since I can't do that, what I've settled on is heartbeat + mon.  
Heartbeat will monitor for a system level failure and switch to the 
backup machine if neccesary; and mon will watch the asterisk (or any 
other) service and restart it and/or alert me if it fails.

There are other options for high availability.  Google for "linux 
clustering" or "[your platform] clustering".  I only stuck with 
heartbeat and mon because they were both relatively simple to set up (as 
long as you stick with a heartbeat version 1 config).