Distributed Presence For Asterisk in Asterisk 1.6.1.

There were many occasions that we wanted presence information across multiple Asterisk servers. In the past we had to do various gimmicks to get that done ;). But going over the new Asterisk 1.6.1 Now I see that it has been made available to us, mainly due to lot of hard work by Russell Bryant.
According to a post by him on his blog, Asterisk 1.6.1 will have the ability to share device state between servers using a new module, res_ais, which uses the SAForum AIS to share events between Asterisk servers. It has been tested with and developed against the openais implementation of AIS.

You can read his post to find links to the code and follow comments that request (demand) DUNDi over XMPP and vice versa.

Tags: Distributed Presence, Asterisk, Asterisk Cluster, DUNDi, XMPP, Asterisk 1.6.1

Asterisk Redundancy via Pseudo Cluster .

Pseudo Cluster to provide Asterisk Redundancy.
Today I came across this post via Astpligg, (If you do not know what Astpligg is it is time you check it out. The pure reason that you are connected to VoIP is enough to pay a visit to astpligg!)
Well have you ever wondered how to provide redundancy to your Asterisk setup. What do I do if the Asterisk Server goes down?
We all have tried many solutions, I prefer active /passive linux cluster/mirror that is too complex to explain here. It has to be a separate article. And that statement it self explain the simplicity of the method I am going show you.
I will state the obvious and let you grab the technical information from the main article.

"Main points in the proposed solution are:

• each local call from IP phones arrives in the cluster-local context. Here we only manage the local calls in the dial plan, but we could easily add standard external routing, voicemail or any kind of call.
• each call arriving from another cluster node is pushed to the cluster-from-remote context.
• FROM_CLUSTER variable is set to avoid loops between cluster members. It is set when receiving a call from a remote member et checked before routing the call to another member. If we install more than two members, this principle should be enhanced with a variable passed in the call or a specific prefix.
• when a call is passed from one member to another, the caller identifier is changed in order not to collide with SIP local extensions. Here we are using 9999 as prefix and suppress it at arrival.

This is a really simple way of providing redundancy to our Asterisk solution. It is called “cluster” but is really not a real cluster. "

Asterisk redundancy, a very simple approach by Panoramisk

Tags: Asterisk, Asterisk cluster, Asterisk redundancy, astpligg

Clustered Asterisk with BioCluster

With promises and road maps to cluster anything that could be clustered as well as traditionally unclusterble devices, BioCluster peer-to-peer clustering engine, has come out with Asterisk Cluster solution.

BioCluster now in beta, is a peer-to-peer clustering platform for Asterisk, the Open Source PBX. It is meant to be installed on several machines together with Asterisk, and turns them into a VoIP cluster, which can then be managed as a whole, with data replicated across it. Thus there is no single point of failure, and machines can be easily added or removed from the cluster.

BioCluster Features

Among the features that BioCluster Free Edition 1.0 Beta supports are:

• SIP extensions
• Trunks: SIP, IAX2, Zap
• Priority routes
• Dialplan editing
• IVR
• User roles
• Call recording
• Music on hold
• Sound files
• Credits
• CDR - tracking, queries, summaries, and sending to a central local or remote CDR database
• Voice mail
• Voice channels - monitoring active channels and hanging up channels

BioCluster Free Edition comes with a command line interface to configure various aspects of the cluster. BioCluster can be easily extended with various other PBX features, and its protocol can be adapted for clustering of other applications.

In addition to the above features, there are several commercial addons available for BioCluster. These can be obtained from Atelis, among them:

• Web interface for managing the cluster (accessible through a web-browser)
• Personal portal for each user, accessible through a web-browser, with ability to manage user's voicemail, recorded calls and call forwarding
• Call groups
• Direct Dial In
• Conferences
• Call parking
• Queues

The web interface with all above features can be previewed at the BioCluster demo.

BioCluster Licensing

Atelis BioCluster is released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and it is available for download free of charge.

A demo of the cluster is available here.

The down loads are available at the Source Forge site.

Project website also known as VoIPCluster.org

Tags: Asterisk, Asterisk cluster, biocluster, peer to peer asterisk, p2p asterisk, VoIPCluster