Hot spare and massive volume of call recordings

FreePBX Tips and Tricks
1

So, I am in the process of building a hot spare setup. The client will be recording all calls and keep them for a year.
I have 6TB of space (3 2TB diks) in each server to store everything.

From some tests I run, the backup that I have configured as hot swap doesn’t copy the recording files.
Well I prefer it this way, making a backup of the configuration and moving with scp all files to the spare server.
But how you would tackle the moving of the files between the 3 disks and keeping cdr reporting happy to be able to retrieve the file through the gui.
Any recommendations are welcome.

2

if you have the space, set up an NFS Mount, and map that to your /var/spool/asterisk folder on both servers.
that way, all recordings are only in 1 location.

we do the same with our endpoint config files.

3

From previous installations and documentantion mounting a network share as the destination folder for MixMonitor is a bad idea that might cause recordings with unsync parts.
I would prefer first make the recordings in a local folder and then move it to a network share.

4

i would disagree with that, based on how NFS Mounts have worked for us in the past, but fair.

5

Ha, so you have some experience with recordings, you mentioned config files which is just a small file that is waiting to be served.
So you had success with this kind of solution. I though doing something like that but I don’t have a third storage server, just these two.

6

You don’t, period. You properly use RAID or LVM or similar to create a single 6TB store from the 3 disks, and then you properly mount that. as the recording location.

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7

our recordings and endpoint configs both use this.

Worst case, the current active calls don’t get processed 100% during a server failure.
which … the call will die when the server does anyway.

best case, all of our recordings transfer to the spare.

8

There are a couple of things to add to /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf to alleviate stale nfs or otherwise disappearing network shares

cache_record_files => yes
record_cache_dir => /private/tmp

where record_cache-dir is local and well sized.

Look into glusterfs if you are limited to two machines and want the share to be bi-directional (replicated in glusterfs-speak). I used zfs as the underlying drive format.

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9

Well I though using RAID but to use all available space I must configure it as RAID 0 which I think it is not a good idea. On the other hand LVM seems the solution to go. If I loose one of the disks what happens to the LVM. I have never used a volume spanning three physical disks.

@Dicko I have never used glusterfs, can you share any link that you have used before.

10

https://www.gluster.org/

Would be a good place to start. For zfs arrays of disks and the why’s

Is a good overview.

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