[asterisk-users] Is Asterisk really good??

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 04:39:39PM -0700, Steve Edwards wrote:
> >>> I'm in the midst of rearranging things (which are 2 to 3 times as large
> >>> as they were then); I'll update that once I'm done.
> >>
> >> Double-plus cool.
> >>
> >> I'd be interested in sections like "Rolling out a new server" or "How we
> >> maintain all the little configuration files without losing our sanity."
> >
> > I smell a magazine article.  :-)
> 
> That works, but I'm impatient. I'm up for "peer review" before 
> publication.

Understood.  Real Magazines tend to be picky about first pub, though.

> > The answer to the second question is likely going to become "rsync or
> > cfengine", but I haven't gotten that far yet... and we don't change
> > them all that much anyway.  VICIdial has *lots* of knobs.
> 
> I'm mainly interested in "consistency" in configuration. The "method" has 
> to be sophisticated enough to handle "this box has 2 Ethernet interfaces 
> so I should configure OpenSER and Asterisk to listen to both IP addresses 
> on ports 5060 and 5061 respectively." This would preclude rsync.

True.  That's why I was leaning towards cfengine, which I gather is
tuned for that sort of thing.

> I currently do it with shell scripts but I'm looking for something a bit 
> more sophisticated.
> 
> Puppet (http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/AboutPuppet) was 
> suggested during the Friday morning VOIP Users Conference. It's open 
> source and written in Ruby. I just feel a bit silly installing "yet 
> another language" just to support a support tool.

Indeed.

> The "shell script" approach has the advantage of "light weight." I do a 
> "minimal" Centos 5 install and wget a single script which does everything 
> -- configures the network, installs packages (OpenSER, Asterisk, Zaptel, 
> Libpri, MySQL), adds users, and configures everything from services to 
> timezone. I may stick with it, but it's getting a bit combersome and am 
> interested in what has worked for others.

Noted.  Our solution may not help you all that much; I gather that with
the exception of one small chunk of one file, all our boxen are
configured exactly the same.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
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