Introducing…

The new monitoring system in the Sys Admin Department. Four consecutive monitors with the advance monitoring tools are fully loaded to provide the best monitoring service to the tech team. The monitoring system includes-

1. Smokeping Network Analyzer tool that monitors the VOIP Phones, Workstations, Network Switches and the Internet Sharing Servers and represent the analysis graph.

2. Realtime monitoring graph that reflects the internet connectivity and consumption of all the ISS.

3. Realtime Call Monitor that shows the number of incoming live calls along with the Agent as well as Group Statistics and

4.  Finally the Zabbix Monitor that keeps an eye at the whole galaxy of servers and websites of our company all the time and informs the current status of the clients connected to it.

If so happens, always start asterisk from asterisk user:-


#su asterisk
#asterisk

We should not use any custom user and of course not “root” user. If we start asterisk as any non-asterisk user, various functionalities may be affected like our custom applications may not get permissions to execute asteisk cli commands.

For ex. If we run asterisk as root, then php apps running via apache, when execute asterisk cli commands, get following error:-
Unable to connect to remote asterisk (does /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl exist?)

Run this command
#ls -l /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl
srwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Aug 3 04:55 /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl

As shown in the above result, non root users have no write permission.

Hence stop the asterisk using following command:-
#asterisk -rx "stop gracefully"
When asterisk will stop, use above mentioned process of starting asterisk as asterisk user.

1. Record Incoming Call On Demand. Record Outgoing Call On Demand
   Extensions in this class:  8001, 8002, 8003, 8004, 8005 (total 5 in number)
2. Record All Incoming Call. Record All Outgoing Call
   Extensions in this class:  9001, 9002, … , 9145 (total 145 in number)

To avoid manual configuration of each extension, I had taken following steps:-

1. Execute following queries on asterisk database (mysql):
   UPDATE asterisk.users SET recording='out=Adhoc|in=Adhoc' WHERE extension IN (8001, 8002, 8003, 8004, 8005)
UPDATE asterisk.users SET recording='out=Always|in=Always' WHERE extension >= 9001 AND extension <= 9145

   The above queries updates the recording setting for extensions in database. The effect for extension 8001 may be seen at http://Your-Asterisk-Freepbx-Server-Domain-Name/admin/config.php?type=setup&display=extensions&extdisplay=8001

2. Open each extension page and press the submit button. Finally click “Apply Configuration Changes” so that the changes may be propagated in running asterisk server

At the datacenter the “IP KVM Virtual USB drive” wire was black and so were the power cables going into each of the servers.

We replaced the black wire with a red wire.

Now when we call remote hands to put the red wire labeled “IP KVM Virtual USB drive” to the USB port on one of the servers it would be so much easier,

The cables have been organized using “Velcro tie wrap” to avoid tampering of the cables accidentally.

On this server the operating system is installed on the 8GB compact flash card. So that the 10 hard drives of 1 TB each can be dedicated just to store the data in Raid1 and LVM on top of it.

Some of the things we are doing to install the OS on the flash card:
1. /var will be on the hard disk.
2. noatime for each of the partitions mounted on the flash card.

This article helped us quite a lot in optimizing our OS installation for the flash card:
http://deepgeek.us/running-linux-of-compact-flash

This is a must read for all grmtech colleagues:

http://www.fonality.com/blog/leadership-never-given-its-taken