vicidial.org

I don't know about anybody else, but I grew tired of always seeing constant "Manager 'sendcron' logged on from 127.0.0.1" messages in the CLI and logs.

If you'd like to turn it off, there are two ways. One is to decrease the verbose level to 1. This I would not recommend. Instead, edit /etc/asterisk/manager.conf with your favorite text editor (vi, nano, etc.) and add the following under each user that you want to silence:

displayconnects = no

And then issue a "reload" command.

This does NOT work in the [general] section of that file for some reason (bug in asterisk?)

I've tested this on asterisk 1.8 and have successfully eliminated those messages.

While you're in that file, you can probably change the bindaddr to the address of the interface you're actually using instead of binding to all addresses, but I haven't tested it yet so do so at your own risk (leave the displayconnects variable set to yes if you're going to test bindaddr just to make sure those cron users can still connect).

I hope this info is useful to someone.

Thanks for this. BTW I tested the bind address change and it works fine. I've also tried using ACL's and that also works. This is all on a cluster so I can confirm there's no Asterisk manager API interaction between the servers.

apb1963 wrote:This does NOT work in the [general] section of that file for some reason (bug in asterisk?)

After some testing, I have found that actually this does work. However, Asterisk will only honour this being set in the [general] section after a full restart of the asterisk daemon. So in ViciDIAL terms this basically means a reboot of the telephony server.

All good things to know! Thanks for that!

I'm not sure what you mean by "telephony server" as the term "server" is somewhat ambiguous since both hardware and software are often called servers. I'm going to assume you mean hardware in this case.

Assuming you do, if you open a terminal window you should be able to do "amportal restart" which should restart asterisk without having to reboot the hardware. Personally I don't like to reboot the entire machine just to restart a daemon or two. I'm funny like that. I will however mention that sometimes the network can get funky and a hardware reboot is the only answer. You have to know when to hold'em and when to fold'em. Play at your own risk

I'm using a cluster. So I have a database server (running MariaDB), a web server (running Apache), and several telephony servers (running Asterisk). In *nix land, the software that runs on a machine and provides services with no local user interaction are generally known as daemons.

So then you're rebooting the hardware (server) not the software (daemon), as I suspected. Which is why I provided the info on amportal. I trust you'll find it useful.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out the fact that daemons are restarted, not rebooted whereas hardware is rebooted not restarted - though once again different people use the terminology loosely (some would say wrongly). For example the command "service httpd restart" would stop and then start the httpd daemon and the command "reboot" at the shell prompt would shut down the entire machine, and then boot it. Semantics, but when one doesn't know for sure what is meant, it's always best to ask and find out to be certain if in fact it matters.

Not to belabor the point but, from the rsync man page on ubuntu:

Rsync refers to the local side as the "client" and the remote side as the "server". Don’t confuse
"server" with an rsync daemon -- a daemon is always a server, but a server can be either a daemon or a
remote-shell spawned process.

And from the man page for X:

X Window System servers run on computers with bitmap displays. The server distributes user input to and
accepts output requests from various client programs through a variety of different interprocess communi‐
cation channels. Although the most common case is for the client programs to be running on the same
machine as the server, clients can be run transparently from other machines (including machines with dif‐
ferent architectures and operating systems) as well.

From wikipedia:

The term server is used quite broadly in information technology. [...] in theory any computerised process that shares a resource to one or more client processes is a server. [...] while a laptop or personal computer is not typically known as a server, they can in these situations fulfill the role of one, and hence be labelled as one. It is, in this case, the machine's role that places it in the category of server.
In the hardware sense, the word server typically designates computer models intended for hosting software applications under the heavy demand of a network environment.

So, as I said the term server is somewhat ambiguous and different people have different ideas as to what exactly defines a "server". Which is why I tried to be extra helpful in that regard.

Cheers

When I indicated one could do an "amportal restart", I didn't realize that amportal isn't installed under "normal" conditions. As I had installed asterisk from scratch prior to installing vicidial, my setup was different. I'm now using goautodial installed from ISO and I've come to realize amportal doesn't exist in this type of installation. So, instead one can simply do "core stop now" or "core stop when convenient" from the asterisk CLI or with "asterisk -rx" from the terminal. That will stop the asterisk daemon (v1.8, maybe other versions too). Then you can restart it from the same place you would normally reload it. This avoids the need to reboot the computer in most instances.

actually after pulling the file, through ftp, then editing, then uploading and overwriting the original, then simply issuing a 'core restart now' from the asterisk CLI, I was able to get rid of the messages, no need for rebooting the whole system.