Ok so maybe the title of this article is a bit misleading but I figured it would grab some attention. You see we are a rapidly growing international company and for us Asterisk has been amazing. As the saying goes ?Give them an inch and they ask for a mile?, which in this instance couldn?t be truer.
Let me start out with a simple layout first.
Each office gets its own Asterisk server to handle all internal/external calling, voicemail, and conferencing.
We currently have 5 Servers spread across the world.
Paris, France = PRS
Leipzig, Germany = LPZ
Taucha, Germany = TAU
Pittsburgh, USA = PIT
Greensburg, USA = GBG
All of the servers listed above are interconnected via IAX2 trunks and I couldn?t be more please with the performance. Yes there are some drops here and there when going overseas but most of the time the call completes as expected. Then come more requests?.
Since our company like many other companies have employees with mobile computers they tend to more around a lot. And I mean a lot! For instance, the US branch of this company employs me but I am currently in Germany writing this article.
Hopefully you are starting to see where I am headed. If not don?t worry I am going to get to the point now. Each of our servers has a unique list of users configured on it. What I would like to do is share these lists between all of our servers. The best example I can provide would be Cisco routers. Cisco uses routing protocols such as RIP, IGRP, and OSPF. What would be ideal would be a protocol that functions similarly within asterisk. I could be completely off my horse but I don?t think it would be that hard to write a protocol that would support these features.
The benefits would be huge?
- Users could have the same extension no matter what office they were currently in
- SIP / Firewall problems would be a thing of the past because all the information would be shared over the same IAX trunk that currently handles calls
- Since the servers already share user lists it should also be possible to extend this to voicemail, thus users can forward messages to anyone in the company with ease
This is obviously just a dreamers prospective but I am more than willing to donate my time to learn and contribute to a cause such as this.
Please share any criticisms / agreements you may have as I would love to hear from as many people as possible.
Ta ta for now
-Lucas