[Asterisk-Users] why a perfectly fine iax2 host becomes UNREACHABLE?

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Thursday 04 May 2006 15:51, Tom Engleward wrote:
> Am I supposed to make a cron job to automatically tell
> asterisk to reload every so often, since iax2 likes to
> periodically die? Or maybe am I supposed to make a
> cron job to place a phone call every so often from an
> external phone into my asterisk system and verify that
> asterisk actually answers, and immediately issue
> asterisk a reload if it fails?

No, you are supposed to realize that a) this software cost you nothing.  Not 
one penny.  b) this software is user-supported.  This means that in order to 
make it better you need to help.  and c) we don't owe you anything.  Not a 
thing.

If you're not a programmer, you can help with bug reports, packet traces, 
helping us run test cases of fixes, etc.  If you are a programmer, you can 
try to help us figure out what's causing it directly and creating scenarios 
in which it happens.

In either case.  you may NOT bitch and whine about how unacceptable it is.  If 
you want to pay someone to listen to you complain, buy ABE, or go buy your 
father's PBX.

> This is utterly ridiculous. Yes, I know, it's free
> software and all, and "you get what you pay for."
> Just in a bad mood today because I've literally lost
> thousands of dollars due to asterisk's failure to
> reliably answer incoming calls, and I only discover
> these failed incoming call attempts later when I check
> my PSTN originator's logs. I then go "oh crap!" and do
> a test call into my asterisk system, and get Ma Bell's
> "the number you are calling has been disconnected or
> is no longer in use", and I issue a "reload" to
> asterisk and try again, and this time my call
> succeeds. At this rate soon it will be more profitable
> for me to just invest in a traditional reliable PBX
> hooked to Ma Bell and be done with these problems.
> I'm not a Digium customer, so they have no reason to
> listen to me, but surely there are Digium customers
> who are also getting bitten by this iax2 bug.
> Is anybody on this list actually using iax2 for
> anything mission-critical?

I use Asterisk for my company's phone system.  EVERY call, and I mean every 
one (faxes too) passes through two Asterisk boxes.  One connected to our PRI 
downtown, and one connected to our Norstar here at the office.  Since January 
I've passed over 37000 calls through these boxes.  Yes, we've had bad days.  
We've had days where it's crashed and we've dropped every call in progress.  
We also run the svn trunk (i.e. bleeding edge) code, which is both a blessing 
and a curse.  :-)  Overall though, it has worked VERY well for us, and we're 
just starting to scratch the surface of the capabilities I have sold this 
solution on.  My customers, however, know and understand that this is new and 
will have some hiccups.  I try to minimize it, of course, but it's an 
inevitability.

If it's mission critical, you should also have the facilities to handle 
failover and clustering.  If it's mission critical, where was your Nagios or 
other network monitor watching, placing test calls and paging you whenever 
this happened?  If this is mission critical, where is your contingency plan?  
Losing "thousands of dollars" is never fun, but if you're not willing to help 
with the bugfixes and throw some wrench time at the problem then you should 
not be trying to sell a solution using Asterisk.  It really is that simple.  
That'd be equivalent to someone not knowing a socket wrench from a wing-nut 
and opening up his own full-service auto garage.

-A.