[asterisk-users] Asterisk 1.4 reliability problems

[Steve Totaro]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 5:40 AM, Ben Willcox
<ben.willcox at british-gymnastics.org> wrote:
> Hello All,
>
>  We have been experiencing some ongoing reliability problems with
>  Asterisk for quite some time, and I am trying to find out if anyone else
>  has experienced the same problems.
>
>  We are running asterisk 1.4.17~dfsg-2+b1 on Debian Lenny, with a Digium
>  PRI card, and have approximately 120 sip peers, mostly Snom 360s, with a
>  few Grandstream GXP2000 and a handful of Handytone 486 units.
>
>  The symptoms, when they occur, are as follows:
>
>  -The inability to receive incoming calls to our ISDN PRI (callers get a
>  busy tone), this starts off becoming intermittent but becomes permanent.
>
>  -Asterisk cli commands work once, but then no longer return any data
>  until disconnecting and reconnecting to the cli, i.e. sip show peers,
>  show channels etc.
>
>  -Internal SIP calls stop working
>
>  -Calls remain stuck in queues, the queue members do not ring, and show
>  as Busy when issuing a 'queue show' command.
>
>
>  We've actually had these sort of problems for many months now, which
>  originally started when we were running Asterisk 1.2 on Gentoo. We have
>  done a large amount of fault finding and testing, which has involved a
>  replacement ISDN card, reinstall on complete different server hardware,
>  and changing to Asterisk 1.4 on Debian Lenny.
>
>  I believe there may be two separate issues here - we did track down one
>  problem to our cacti and nagios monitoring scripts, which were
>  connecting and disconnecting to the manager interface several times per
>  minute, which eventually caused asterisk to give the above symptoms,
>  although in addition to the above, asterisk would consume 100% cpu on
>  the box, and eventually need a hard-reboot of the server. I posted about
>  this to the list a few weeks ago, and it was confirmed that this could
>  cause such a problem. After stopping these services the problems were
>  much reduced.
>
>  However, we have now completely disabled the manager interface
>  (enabled=no in manager.conf), and yesterday the problem occurred again -
>  a restart of asterisk got everything going again.
>  So really I'm at a loss as to where to go from here. A colleague of mine
>  also has the same problem at his site running Asterisk 1.4 on Debian
>  Lenny, he has never used the manager interface, and has completely
>  different server hardware and ISDN card, so I wonder if it's a Debian
>  specific problem?
>
>  One option is to try reverting back to Asterisk 1.2, but that isn't
>  really a long-term solution. We also had major problems with 1.2 with
>  our Snom 360 phones, as with any Snom firmware > 6.2.2 there was a
>  serious problem whereby on hangup the channels were not cleared down,
>  meaning we had many outgoing ISDN calls held open for many hours until
>  we realised the problem. This problem does not occur in Asterisk 1.4,
>  although we have many log messages such as:
>
>  chan_sip.c: Remote host can't match request BYE to call <callid>
>
>  so I don't know if this is anything to worry about?
>
>  Any help would be gratefully received!
>
>  Thanks,
>  Ben

I have seen this when banging on the AMI but you eliminated that.

Why not try a different OS such as CentOS for now?  That would be my next step.

Thanks,
Steve Totaro