On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 9:09 AM, Michelle Dupuis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mdupuis@ocg.ca">mdupuis@ocg.ca</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Are there any best practices for using a SAN with Asterisk? In the past we've kept config files local, but voicemail on a SAN. Aree there any issues with latency putting voice prompts, configs, etc. on a SAN?<br>
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Anyone have some best practices to share?<br></blockquote><div><br><br>We mount up a Netapp SAN for backup purposes. We rsync the live files (/etc, /var/spool/asterisk) to the SAN hourly for backup (losing an hour of voicemail wouldn't hurt us that much), but you could rsync at a different frequency.<br>
<br>But all live files Asterisk uses, including voice prompts, are served out of the local file system on top of RAID-1 local disk. We did this to allow Asterisk to continue functioning in he midst of a SAN/network outage - backups will error out or hang, but Asterisk will keep going.<br>
<br>We push out voice prompts and most config files via Puppet (<a href="http://www.puppetlabs.com/">http://www.puppetlabs.com/</a>) - with the Puppet repository being backed by an SVN repository so we have version control of all the changes we push out. We do this for other systems (such as web servers) to ensure all the systems end up with the same versions of files as each other. The only downside is they don't all get the changes at exactly the same time, but for something like voice prompts and configs I would think that won't matter (voicemail is a different beast).<br>
<br>As for voicemail, if I was running redundant voicemail servers, I'd probably do things differently - put the voicemails on a SAN of some kind, perhaps even modifying Asterisk (with the "voice mail left" hook) to copy any new voicemail to the other box after it is left, if the other box is responsive. Then, I would write something that could merge two voicemail stores (message 1 on VM store 1 might not be the same as message 1 on VM store 2 - if not, copy it over as a new message, not overwriting the old one).<br>
<br>My principle with this has been "Don't make Asterisk depend on anything it doesn't absolutely have to depend upon."<br><br>But I do think you could run prompts and configs off of a SAN - no problem there - but just that you would be building a dependency that would cause Asterisk to have issues if the SAN went offline or became unreachable. How reliable is your network/SAN?<br>
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