October 8th, 2009

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.

September 3rd, 2009

Generally we configure asterisk to auto run on system start up. There may be situations when we may be required to run asterisk manually like when asterisk is overloaded or when asterisk is down for some maintenance.

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.

July 1st, 2009

I have 150 extensions in my asterisk-freepbx setup, which are broadly divided into following two classes :-

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

May 19th, 2009

We celebrated our 7th Foundation day today. We played some fun games and it was a real eventful evening.

Cake	7th Foundation Day Canvas

March 21st, 2009

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,

March 2nd, 2009

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

February 22nd, 2009

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

February 21st, 2009

Its surprising how many of us think this.

This is a must read for all grmtech colleagues:

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

February 18th, 2009

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