One of the areas that I am very interested in right now is coming up with new ways to distribute Asterisk services across multiple servers, both locally with Asterisk clustering, or distributed with servers across the internet. Off and on this year I have been working on an event system. I want to have a framework that is easy to use such that when certain events occur on one server, they can be propogated to a federation of servers.
This effort is broken down to two main parts:
- Internal Event API
- Event Distribution Methods
Internal Event API
The first phase of this effort is to come up with a generic API for generating events inside of Asterisk. This is different than the Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI). The code for generating Asterisk manager events is very specific to the manager interface and does not lend itself toward using this information anywhere else in Asterisk.
I consider this part of the project to already be pretty mature. There is a generic, binary encoded event publish and subscribe API in Asterisk trunk. I have already converted some things to use it, such as Voicemail message waiting information (more on this later!), but a more aggressive effort to convert things to use this API will be done after phase 2 has matured.
Here is the header file for this API if you are curious.
Event Distribution Methods
This part is a little bit more tricky than the first. The project here is to take the binary encoded events that are passed around using the internal event API and distribute them between a distributed network of Asterisk servers. This part is still very much in development.
I have completed a module to implement one method of distributing events. I set it up and verified that voicemail message waiting state was distributed and available between multiple servers. This approach works great for some network scenarios, but not for others.
Details
I have more to say on the specifics of what I’m working on. I will be making follow up posts on this topic to describe details of the event distribution methods I come up with as well as what features are being converted to take advantage of these new underlying features. I can say now that the areas that I have been working on so far are sharing voicemail and device state (presence) information.
I hope that people will find this work useful as it progresses.
Russell Bryant 
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Asterisk Clustering, mejoras para servicios distribuidos
Fuente:
http://russellbryant.net/blog/?p=13
What do you think about AIS
http://www.saforum.org/specification/AIS_Information/
It’s interesting that you bring up AIS. Under the “Event Distribution Methods” heading, I noted that I have written a module for distributing events between servers. The module is called res_ais and uses the EVT (Event) service of AIS to accomplish the task.
I did my development and testing using the open source implementation of AIS, openais.
There are certainly very interesting possibilities with the combination of Asterisk and AIS. I hope that I can continue working with it to take advantage of the tools it provides.
Another interesting note is that a couple years ago, a developer at IBM used AIS to do a proof of concept implementation showing how SIP session information could be transferred to a server in the case of a fault on another server. Eventually, we should be able to get some of these types of features developed for public consumption.
Hi Russell,
Did you try having a loog at http://www.voip-cluster.org – It’s the Atelis BioCluster product for Asterisk clustering, that was released into the open source a while back.
Although it’s currently written in JAVA, I believe you may find some interesting concepts in there.
Nir
Hi Russel,
i’ve been struggling to find a way to save a CDR into multiple databases, in this case, the same CDR saved on MySQL and SQLServer. I’ve about 20 Asterisk servers running TV and Radion contests, which represents about 300.000 calls per day. Now, because of a new TV Contest, i need to save CDR on a SQLServer, so i was looking for a way to set on the TV Show’s dialplan, which is in fact a Context, a way to set the server,database, and table to where to save CDRs. Does this makes any sense to you? 🙂
Is there a way? Requirement: no AGI scripts, no Mysql Replication services. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
Sergio Charrua
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Sergio: How about an Event Listener written in Java (asterisk-java) that listens to the CDR events and pushes the data back to SQLServer?