New Features or Benefits of 1.8

[Nefariousparity]

Hi, I currently have older ViciBox servers in production. I.E. my signature. I was just curious if there were any significant features of upgrading to hit asterisk 1.8?
Currently none of my servers are clustered as I have less then ten agents on each one. However, I do like things that are new. And I was just curious if anything new or exciting has come with the upgrade of asterisk?

Great job as always gentlemen!

[williamconley]

As far as I know, Vicidial still handles all call management. While asterisk 1.8 may have new features ... Vicidial's feature set has not changed.

I believe some centers have attempted to tap "unusual" carriers, who have asterisk 1.8 modules available. skype, google voice, etc.

[Nefariousparity]

Ahh, like using google voice to get free DID's? Or make calls through google voice like a carrier? Now that would be something LOL. Probably horrible performance if true. I would think they would notice that.

Interesting, Interesting in dead.

[williamconley]

indeed. lol

but for a single agent to be able to get his google voice at his desk, quite promising. when added to the rest of the system it's just another tool to make things work.

[Kumba]

1.8 crashses less, or not at all, in our testing. The SIP support is also much better for things like weird carrier configs and third party software like Sangoma CPD. It also seems to behave better under sustained load although the load is generally higher. It's also still being maintained with security and bug fixes.

If what you have is working just fine then you won't notice anything. There is also no Sangoma support in ViciBox5 due to kernel and DAHDI compatibility issues. One day Sangoma will support them. We hope.

[williamconley]

Sounds like it's more of an overall system upgrade than a "fix" of any sort. Same with the MariaDB that helps at sustained high loads. And the mysqli upgrade across the board from mysql because of the deprecation issue. Housekeeping and readying the system for "next gen".

[Kumba]

MariaDB has more to do with Oracle driving MySQL into the ground. For some reason on MySQL 5.5 we have weird phantom issues and it's not consistent. Some setups work flawlessly, some have to be downgraded to MySQL v.5.1. Are best guess, and that's all it was, is that MySQL v.5.5 didn't play well with the mysql php connector. We never got around to testing mysqli on it as vicibox v.5 came with mariaDB and that just worked.

MariaDB v.5.5 not only just works out of the box, it seems to work better with SSDs and doesn't seem to have as many load spikes. After testing on it I understand why OpenSuSE and CentOS jumped ship from MySQL.

[Nefariousparity]

Interesting about mysql. Any thoughts ever about Mongo? One day, would be cool if it were possible without breaking stuff to be able to maintain a huge DNC list. And you can scrub your data against that DNC list while uploading new data.

[williamconley]

We have a package that does this already (designed for the US Federal DNC list). We've found, of course, that scrubbing lists while running the dialer has a detrimental effect. However, we've not tried it on a MariaDB yet. We "could" modify it and attempt to reduce load while scrubbing to avoid hammering the system while its in use, but so far no one with this system has made this request. Daily checks are necessary, and on demand checks for freshly uploaded lists are something one would do at lunch or on a break ... or on a small list only.