AWS Lightsail Hosted - Any1 want to try?

[carpenox]

Ok so I have been working pretty hard towards setting up my vicidial server and through trials and errors I believe I have finally mastered the technique to getting it all working on opensuse via a scratch install for those of you who can't remotely load an .iso. I have written instructions on how to do it and I am curious to know if the instructions play out the way it should for someone else without having to troubleshoot problems along the way. I think I have them all ironed out. Anyone want to try it out? I used AWS Lightsail with opensuse 15.1 on their free month option and i have done it on 3 different instances now and they are all working. The instructions will walk you through the vicibox install step by step, not actually setting up vicidial, refer to the manual for that.

Hit me up if youre interested by responding to this, PM thru here or email.


Now im going to work on separating the services between the 3 boxes, one db, one telephony and one web

[Nefariousparity]

Many have tried, very few have succeeded, but the measure of success is subjective. I got very close to virtualization some things with containers, but in the end you can never get a SIP server to perform the same as bare metal.

[Kumba]

SIP itself is fine, but the RTP audio stream that SIP controls is the problem. But I'm just being pedantic

[williamconley]

Challenges to tackle if you head down that road:

# Virtualized dialer perl scripting requires hi-res timing.
# Virtualized server processing a SIP call. CPU share during call processing is an issue.
# Virtualized network switches/routers create lag and jitter in often unpredictable ways

What works now may suddenly (and temporarily) hiccup in 20 minutes. The cause can be untraceable since you don't have visibility into the hosting server's load levels. So you may find what you think is the problem only to have the problem recur at what appears to be a random moment again later.

Beware Virtualization for any reason other than having a few dozen clients who each have a tiny usage requirement and allowing them to share a few servers in hardware. IE: One server may be able to hold 50 agents (if it's powerful enough), but that same server Virtualized may only hold 20, but those 20 users may be in 10 different tiny call centers. So one server handles 10 call centers instead of one call center, but at a loss of 30 seats. That's a worthy trade off (if you can handle 10 call centers with one big server instead of 10 standard servers...).

To date it won't work if you want to use a server capable of 25 agents to manage two different call centers with 12 agents each. The loss is MUCH more significant. And when you move this to a virtualization system you don't control (no visibility into the back side), you just can't predict when a bottleneck will slam you. I've had call centers who were very happy for over a month, and suddenly their system is unreliable for "no reason". No visibility into the load of the host server is a big bummer. lol

Remember we're talking about virtualization, not "cloud". Having a dedicated physical server in a colocation facility that likes to use they word "cloud" doesn't change that the server is a dedicated physical server. Nothing wrong with the server being "elsewhere", just don't virtualize it and you're good. But remember that virtualized networking is also problematic. You need full speed networking which reliably has no lag or jitter problems. Virtualization anywhere in the path can sneak up on you.

[carpenox]

Thank you gentlemen for your replies, it was mainly something I wanted to try just to see if I could do it and then replicate that process and have it work again which I have been able to prove by setting up several lightsail instances and using the same procedures each time and ending up with a working "vicibox"(just using that word to encompass all aspects needed to run vicidial successfully) if you will.

[carpenox]

Hdre is a link to instructions if anyone wants to try it out and let me know if it works for you: https://textuploader.com/1htul

[kashinc]

Hdre is a link to instructions if anyone wants to try it out and let me know if it works for you: https://textuploader.com/1qfh8

this link is dead?

[carpenox]

fixed - https://textuploader.com/1htul

[kashinc]

fixed - https://textuploader.com/1htul

dead again

Error 403

THE REQUESTED POST HAS EXPIRED.

IF YOU CREATED THIS TEXT, IT IS AVAILABLE AFTER AUTHENTICATION.

GO HOME OR BACK TO YOUR DASHBOARD.

[carpenox]

dunno why it keeps doing that, try now

[williamconley]

Less dead link:

http://viciwiki.com/index.php/OpenSuSE_in_AWS_lightsail

But ... should we change the title? There is no "Vicidial 9.0.2" that's Vicibox, not Vicidial. Vicibox, however, is the installer and this is obviously NOT the Vicibox installer, lol. Depending on the instruction set (haven't read it), it may install "the latest in SVN" version of Vicidial.

But at least this way the link won't be dead unless our wiki server is offline.

[carpenox]

anyone try this out yet? It would work on any virtual server that you could install opensuse 15.1 im sure

[williamconley]

there has been a Lot of Discussion on the topic of Virtual Vicidial.

virtual vicidial has been done Many times. but only viable for testing, development, or perhaps up to 3 or 4 calls (1 or 2 agents). It falls apart with shared processors due to perl hi-res timing requirements (without which vicidial is entirely unstable after a few agents even on hardware).

so this "specific to lightsail" installer is very useful ... if you need a mini-vici and happen to need/like lightsail.

I encourage you to try it and report your findings. Note that to date all those who have claimed to have broken the barrier (25 agents on a virtual vicidial?) have gone silent shortly thereafter and always seem to leave out a crucial details. For instance, I can spend $4k on a server and put vSphere on it and dedicate ALL the resources of the virtual system to a single Vicidial server and make it work. But I just spent $4k on a single server ... that we sell retail for $1k. It doesn't count until that $4k server would handle at least 4 (preferably 8 ...) fully-utilized vicidial servers.

Otherwise it's excellent for tiny Vicidial implementations such as real estate agents, notification systems running a couple calls at a time ... even generic office servers with only a couple live calls at any given moment in time. You can run many of those tiny Vici's on a single host. Just not a powerful system. Falls apart.

[Nefariousparity]

The closest we got , was almost rebuilding the Vicidial ISO to be used as a Custom installer on Docker, Containerized system, in the end I"m not even sure which one we used. It "SORT OF" worked. We spent about 3 months on the project. And this was on a dedicated server with 4x 10 cores, 128 GB of memoy, and 6x SSDS. It was super nice and convenient to just type a command and watch telephony servers spin up for clients. But there was always little issues that would not be there for bare metal boxes that just was to much for a production client to be ok with. We got close.

[williamconley]

You are in good company.

[carpenox]

Nefarious,
What system did you use for containers? kubernetes?

Nox

[williamconley]

Nefarious,
What system did you use for containers? kubernetes?

Nox

You're funny. If someone had paid US to do it, it would very likely be operational. But it wouldn't be cheap.

We've been brought in on several (many ...) systems that were failing without a valid explanation over the last decade or so. In each case to date where we've found "Virtual!" to be the problem, we have so notified the person(s) bankrolling the project that their systems would likely be fully functional Right Now if they made one simple change: Put it all on hardware!

In each and every case, they have had such a huge investment up to that point, and were so close to deadline (always the case) that if all they had to do was purchase hardware and re-install to be "up" ... they have always opted for "just build it and go!" This is especially true since our advice has always been that this is the likely outcome anyway, even if they pay us there would be a development period, the final code may not actually be upgrade-proof, and of course it would be impossible to estimate the cost until we've gotten well into it.

So ... nobody has paid us to delve. We do have many (smaller) clients who use Vicidial virtually. These range from Real Estate (one or two agents MAX online at any given moment in time) to just small call centers and of course sandboxes for developers. We also have some clients who use "annualized" virtual servers to run reports for prior years without having to keep the data in the LIVE server. Handy.

[Nefariousparity]

From what I can remember, We started with docker, then went to I think machinectl? Ended up having to also rewrite system D or something use some alternate. It would run, but every so often calls would get weird. And at some point, calls got really bad. So we scrapped it. My guess maybe if you have timer card. I can think of all kinds of ways but it starts to get beyond my skilset.

[williamconley]

And then you'd need a timer card for each instance ... but that's only for the audio. Audio was never really the issue, the timer card isn't for execution of the application.

I've heard a lot of stories of attempts. And they all get close, many claim success, but there's always the caveat that makes it (in the end) useless for major installations. The only way it's useful if you have need for several tiny installations and prefer not to purchase a single server for each instance. Works wonders for that.

[carpenox]

ive got a containers course about kubernetes coming up, so im gonna give it a shot with that afterwards and see how it functions. Ill keep u updated, but its not for antoher 2 weeks or so...

[Nefariousparity]

I have thought about doing it again recently, because I have had a rush of one off 4-6 seaters that don't want to pay for servers... But then again not sure if I want to support the infinite amount of questions of people just now entering this world.

[carpenox]

and those WILL come, its what i do most the day, its exhausting

[nurklux]

Please could anyone put me through on how to install VICIDIAL on AWS Lightsail? Please urgent
Thank you.