Sorry, the other thread that I started on this is closed already. The original thread is here:
I now have mysecondary FreePBX server, on a new IP address (FreePBX 15). I restored all the extensions and settings, and of course, kept the different IP address. I have a DNS record for my original SIP server (Just an example, of course it’s not this but you get the idea) freepbx.thislocation.internal, my second server is at freepbx.thatlocation.local.
Both server’s work perfectly as they should. Both models of my phones support 3 - 6 SIP accounts per phone. As well, each account allows for DUAL registration to a secondary failover SIP account. I wanted to get your opinion on a couple of FAIL OVER scenarios, and ask the community what they think the best setup / config would be. There would be some manual failover based on DNS record changes for some of these scenarios. Which is fine. I’m just going for a low cost decently timed failover.
Scenario A:
I point the DNS record freepbx.thislocation.internal at the IP of the secondary server, wait for the phones to do a DNS refresh on their own, and people are using the secondary SIP server for phone calls now.
Scenario B:
I populate Account 1’s Secondary SIP server field, and let the phones decide when they are not talking to freepbx.thislocation.internal anymore, and let them determine and failover on their own to freepbx.thatlocation.internal Not sure how precise the phone are at this, or what this would look like.
Scenario C:
I populate a Second account on the phone (Account 2) with freepbx.thatlocation.internal, the secondary Freepbx server, is on a different IP but has the same Extension scheme etc. I let the user push the account 2 button to make phone calls in a failover event / Scenario.
I have tested Scenario C, and it seems to work fine. I cannot test Scenario A and B unless I tested basically a real failover, so I have not tried that yet, to see how fast the phones flip over on their own in either of those scenarios, IE after a DNS change, and or failover to the second account on their own. I’m leaning towards scenario C right now.
On a side note. When I tested scenario C, everything seems to work fine. Account 2 did NOT have any voicemail setup on it IE no box mapped under the account, but I had one weird issue with one of the phones. Even though there was no mapped Voice mail button setup on the phone for the SIP account, for some reason, Account 1 kep seeing account 2’s Voicemail…They technically are the same Extnesion mappings on each server, but the servers are separate IP’s…so not sure why that was happening. I don’t care about voicemail during failover…so I could just clear out ALL voicemail on the second FreePBX server, but I would still like to know why a separate account, registered with a unique SIP server, would see the other SIP server Voicemail…this seemed VERY odd to me. So Seperate SIP server registration for each account, Unique IPs. No Voicemail button mapping on the second account pointing at a different server, but account 1 was seeing account 2’s VOICEMAIL box…that seemed REALLY odd to me. Any insight would be great.