External telephony server?

[spacejanitor]

-----------------------------
Vicidial 4-server Cluster
VERSION: 2.4-357a
BUILD: 120125-2107
-----------------------------

Has anybody running a cluster tried connecting an external (outside of a LAN) telephony server?

We're in the situation where we want to have a separate building of ours be a "part" of our database... so we can share the same campaigns, reporting, user lists, etc... but we don't want to have our connection needing to hop from Building B back to Building A, where we have our cluster, before going out to the carrier and back again on the same route. If we had a cluster right in Building B, we could keep that voice traffic all in the LAN and go directly to the carrier without introducing all of the latency of going to/from Building A. The only communication we would need would be with the Database Server at Building A.

Has anybody done this with good results?

Thanks

[spacejanitor]

Anyone have any experience with this?

[fibres]

Hi Spacejanitor.

I have never tried this myself but have a couple of bits of info that might help you out.

Firstly from other forum posts it is not recommended to have Asterisk Servers on a different network to the database and web server as even low internetwork latency can cause issues. Therefore I would say it is probably not recommended.

Secondly how do you have your clusters configured currently? If as me you use Distributed Dialing where calls made on a particular server can go to any available user on any server, which is recommended otherwise you can end up dropping calls because they get an answer on one server with no agents while there are agents available on other servers.

If this is the case then you have a lot of calls being handed off from one server to the other going across the link between buildings.

What kind of link do you have between the buildings?

I would suggest if it causes problems having all your dialers in building A that you look at moving to a hosted solution that way you only have a link per agent from each building to your hosted dialers in a central datacentre. This will save on latecy and also required bandwidth at both sites.

Regards

[mcargile]

We have had clients setup straight asterisk boxes in their offices before that the agent's phones register to. Then that asterisk box connects to a dialing server in the data center via an IAX trunk. They setup their phones as external and made the dialplan call through the cross connect to the asterisk box and then to the agents phone. When the agents go to log in, they connect to the web server in the data center. They do this mainly as a bandwidth saving measure. Using IAX trunking and a codec like g729 you can get close to 100 agent connections through a single data T1. Setting up the IAX trunk is tricky though. Also certain models on Cisco hard phones do not handle NAT properly so this is about the only way to overcome that.