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Redundant Premised Solution?

Posted by dbenders on Thu, 10/25/2007
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Thirdlane platform General Questions

Hi, does any one install a redundant premised solution of Asterisk and PBX Manger?

We have some customer that want a very redundant solution, something in 2 servers and a mediagateway. The idea is that the E1 are conected to the media gateways and then the calls are converted to SIP and forwarded to the Thirdlane PBX server as SIP calls. But if the servers dies, the idea is that the second server take the control. Any experience with somethink like that?

Submitted by ipfreely on Sat, 11/03/2007 Permalink

dbenders,

we use a product made by Ranch Networks (now out of business)

This product was a sip aware firewall, which provided the following features

- Session Border Controller

- high Availability (For itself and also Asterisk)

The beauty of this unit was the redundant server did not need to identical to the first one like with linux HA. The most ideal situations is to have 2 asterisk boxes behind this unit. both connected to a third server with a realtime database in Mysql or Postgres. The Ranch box consideres 1 asterisk server as Active and the other as standby. The Ranch box sends a heartbeat not to linux but to Asterisk if the Active server goes offline it switches over the the passive server. Since both servers are connected to the same realtime database everything works. Also since the Ranch box is an SBC it keeps the RTP stream out of asterisk except when things like conference, voicemail or transcoding is required. So this beig said if the Asterisk server fails current calls in progress do not drop.

So now TL does not work with realtime, maybe in future releases. So you would need to duplicate conf files in both servers, which you could write a cron job to do nightly and copy to the other server (as we are doing)

Also since Ranch is out of business I think ingate has a similar product.

Cheers,

Chris A