[asterisk-users] Redundancy / Failover

[Norman Franke]

I've been evaluating Asterisk for a while, and things seem to be  
going very well. The issue of redundancy and automatic fail-over is  
now on my mind. I searched the archives and googled for solutions,  
but didn't really come up with much.

We'll be using queues (modified), which precludes some of the  
standard redundancy solutions, since the queue needs to know all the  
agents and calls to effectively decide what to do. (Correct me if I'm  
wrong as to distributing queues.)

As far as I can tell, I need to be able to fail over to a backup  
server. What's the best way to go about this? Obviously one can just  
have the clients re-connect to the new server, but with 50 machines,  
that can be a major pain. Both could have the same network, and just  
swap network cables and re-login. One could log into both and the  
second wouldn't send calls to the agent unless it got calls from the  
main switch in the event of failure. I'm sure there other solutions.

I've come across other products like Ranch Networks (their web site  
is rather uninformative, although it seems promising) and Redfone's  
foneBRIDGE (which seems it may help.)

I'll be using Sangoma cards on the Asterisk box, if that matters.

Does anyone have experience they'd like to share on effective ways to  
do this?

-Norman