Asterix seems to crash once a day!

I am very new to Asterisk and inherited this system. It seems that it crashed once a day and I have to ssh into the server and restart asterix. Once I do this, everything starts working properly again.
The version is 1.6.2.13

Not even sure what I need to look for in the logs. Some help here would be greatly appreciated

If properly installed, at least on CentOS, Asterisk will be restarted by safe_asterisk, if it crashes. This does not apply if it deadlocks (continues to run but becomes unresponsive), but I think your problem description would have hinted at that if it had been the case.

From /var/log/asterisk/full, you are looking for ERRORs and WARNINGs near the time of the crash, or failing that, anything in common between crashes. However, you really should be getting a backtrace from gdb. Google for “asterisk wiki backtrace”.

Chances are, though, that you don’t have a version built to support debugging, and in any case, it is very unlikely that you are relying on anything that was broken in your version and is fixed in 1.6.2.22, so you should update to the end of line 1.6.2 version and ensure it meets the debugging requirements from that Google search.

For starters, when you restart asterisk, issue the “logger rotate” command from the CLI.
You will then have fresh logs for the new day generated.

With logger rotate the old file will be appended with a number - e.g. full.0 full.1 full.2 etc.

You can then grep for ERROR or WARNING.


grep ERROR /var/log/asterisk/full.x
grep WARNING /var/log/asterisk/full.x

Importantly fix what is causing the ERRORs.