Topic: [Announce] -655 - Vintage feature release

[SARK devs]

Hello Everyone.

Big new release -655.  Available now on the download site.

* Mon Sep 1 2008 Aelintra <coco@aelintra.com> 2.2.1-655
- Fixed faulty password generation on Adopt
- Fixed resolve failure during adopt
- Modified xbb symbol in unprivileged Sibling trunks to use tilde instead (~)
- Added Bounce Alert-Info to Globals to specify distinct ring on bounce
- Added option to turn off FOP Daemon in Globals so that FOP may be run on another server or not run at all
- Fixed pipe symbol problem in seldir/10conf
- Added group CLID Prefix during PTT-DiD create
- Modified SarkSubs Copyright notice
- Modified features.conf to stop accidental # transfer
- Added CANCEL status handler to AGI
- Added Blind Transfer bounce and Camp-on features to mimic trad. switches
- Fixed bug in logrotate template 10-rotate (it wasn't handling generations correctly)
- Added Snom300, 320, 360, 370 .htm files and cut back snom MAC files accordingly
- Added two new feature codes for Snom tight integration
- Added Snom tight integration provisioning so that DND and CFWD at the phone are notified correctly to SARK

The features probably of most interest to end-users are bounce/camp.  A full discussion of these features can be found here…

http://www.aelintra.com/docs/cgi-bin/view/Main/DocChapter2522

High Availability Clustering is running live at a site in South Africa without problems.  A discussion of HA can be found here

http://www.aelintra.com/docs/cgi-bin/view/Main/DocChapter2520

[Franco]

Hi Selintra,
I'm playing now with the -651 release.
One question that came up about the HA: is it possible to run the entire server as HA and not only the PBX piece?
My servers are identical in hardware and so far I have been setting only one side (except for a X400M I'm waiting to arrive
My idea was to mirror the disk in RAID1 and set it on the second machine, then configure the HA.
From the documentation I can only assume the PBX system will be HA.

Thanks,

[SARK devs]

Hi stuntshell,

In theory you could map the whole system.  However, there are some gotchas to contend with in SME.  Linux HA works from a list of server names (look in /etc/ha.d/haresources).  It uses these names to issue systemV type start/stop commands to bring server-tasks into or out of service on each machine.

This is OK for SARK (and some other SME server tasks) but not for things like DHCP, Qmail, CLAMD, etc etc which will auto-restart if you attempt to stop them under SME.  For many server-tasks this won't matter because you can just have them run on both machines. However, I think that you will run into issues with Mail, file sharing and so forth.

You also have to consider data.  With lazy synchronization, the standby SARK server synchronizes the PBX data with its counterpart every time it senses a change in the primary server database (it checks every few seconds using a daemon we created specially for the purpose).    I'm not sure how you would achieve that with email or third party data.

Linux HA just happens to be a great solution for PBX but I'm not so sure about SME services.  I think it might be a lot of work.

Best

Jeff