Just to update you on the work we've been doing since we finished HA 4. HA 4 (ASHA2) is in and happily running at several of our larger sites and the experience so far has been good. Customers particularly like the fact that the nodes can be in separate server rooms up to 90M apart.
Since then we've re-written the provisioning system and the AMACs release update mechanism.
In 4.0.1, AMACs has gone in favour of a more package orientated mechanism. In short, each time you update your release, the database is unloaded and rebuilt on-the-fly. Early testing looks good, it is fast and allows us to do things that were quite tricky with AMACs, particularly replacing system device definitions, which was a big requirement for the new provisioning system to fly straight. Incidentally, Asterisk does not come down or stop while we do the rebuild because SAIL uses a dual DB architecture and has done since 3.1.1.
The new provisioning system is a complete rewrite around a recursive core which allows us to dynamically build a provisioning stream from scratch at the time it is requested by the phone. It also includes support for things like an abstract BLF definition mechanism in the GUI which is the same, irrespective of the underlying phone type.
The first release will support all Aastra, Polycom, Snom and Yealink (V70+) phones. This includes BLF definition on the first out (with perhaps some restrictions in the case of Polycom, although we're still working on them so you never know). We'd also like to get Gigaset in, particularly the DECT range and, if we have time left, we'll do Cisco/Linksys SPA phones as well.
TFTP provisioning as an option is gone in 4.0.1, ALL provisioning is via HTTP. SIP Multicast (PnP) is provided for those phones which support it (Gigaset, Snom, Yealink), while DHCP Option 66 (or whatever other option your vendor supports) is available to everyone. When we put the provisioning system together we looked at all of the other popular provisioning systems out there and spoke to some large professional provisioning companies (one of them with over 40,000 phones under management - gulp!). We think that SARK is architecturally up there with the best of them; - probably because we stole all of the bits we liked from everyone else and dumped all of the stuff we didn't
. Being purely HTTP-based, the new system is also capable of provisioning remote phones and it supports things like "send-credentials-once" to minimize the security risk during repeated remote provisioning.
Finally, we are in the process of moving from in-house svn source management to github so the sail code will shortly be available there for you to hack away at if you feel the need. The ASHA high-availability code is already up there.
Kind Regards
S
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