vicidial.org

Has anyone used Vicidial with Asterisk 1.6.x? Any idea what obstacles or problems I might come up against when attempting such a setup?
I'm a long-time Asterisk user, but new to Vicidial. I am using some of the new functionality of 1.6 so I wouldn't be prone to downgrading. Worst-case scenario (and I mean worst) I would have to set up a separate server for Vicidial. I only have 4 agents so I suspect that would be a waste of $ and resources.

Any thoughts?

We have not tried it in a while, but last time we tried it(a few months ago) it crashed pretty quickly.

There are a lot of significant changes that were made to it and until it is proven in production we will not make the effort to support it. They seem to be taking the same path that they did in 1.4 where they were still making major changes in the early revisions. We will most likely try to start testing 1.6 in the next couple of months, but remember that at this point we still recommend 1.2.30.2 due to it's superior stability.

Thanks for your input. I will probably try to do it anyway and then when it crashes on me I'll end up setting up a separate box.

mflorell wrote:We have not tried it in a while, but last time we tried it(a few months ago) it crashed pretty quickly.

There are a lot of significant changes that were made to it and until it is proven in production we will not make the effort to support it. They seem to be taking the same path that they did in 1.4 where they were still making major changes in the early revisions. We will most likely try to start testing 1.6 in the next couple of months, but remember that at this point we still recommend 1.2.30.2 due to it's superior stability.

I was just wondering if 1.4.22 with dahdi is a problem for you guys? Do you think 1.4 will ever get to where 1.2 is in terms of stability?

We actually recommend 1.4.21.2 instead of 1.4.22 because of some issues that are in that newer version that weren't in the older one.

We have some clients on 1.4.21.2 right now, but over the course of a month the higher volume servers running 1.4.21.2 will crash usually at least once whereas the ones running 1.2.30.2 don't crash at all. This is somewhat helped though if you reboot every night or every week.

mflorell wrote:We actually recommend 1.4.21.2 instead of 1.4.22 because of some issues that are in that newer version that weren't in the older one.

We have some clients on 1.4.21.2 right now, but over the course of a month the higher volume servers running 1.4.21.2 will crash usually at least once whereas the ones running 1.2.30.2 don't crash at all. This is somewhat helped though if you reboot every night or every week.

That's basically what I am doing. I tested before xmas and I was able to get a solid 2 weeks of production on 1.4.21.2. At that point I rebooted for some reason or other. Now that our inbound is all through VoIP, we're more sensitive to downtime, so i'm doing preventative reboots at 3am. I might go back to 1.2 when i have time to redo the dialplan. I'm using stuff in 1.4 that I don't think i can use in 1.2 (templates, macros, etc).

MikeC just mentioned to me this morning that you're no longer even happy with 1.4.21 due to an AGI zombie problem.

I'm about to build a new cluster, and I'll be doing it with 1.2, I guess.

Well, the zombies do go away, and with lighter dialing and manual dialing it's not really a concern. Still it is a problem, especially with rapid outbound autodialing.

Try 1.2.30.2 or the more recent releases if you want to be sure everything will work in all situations. You can even use Zaptel 1.4 with it.

So what is the future plan as the Zaptel drivers are being dropped in favor of Dahdi? Once zaptel is dropped and Dahdi is the standard, the asterisk 1.2.x tree will no longer have hardware support for newer cards.

In the mean time in answer to the original question, I have a system running asterisk 1.4.22.2 and Dahdi 2.1.0.2 that reboots every night and seems to work like a champ.

Well, Zaptel is still supposed to be supported throught the 1.4 Asterisk branch which should be supported for some time. As for hardware being supported under zaptel, I know Sangoma will still support cards as they come out as long as there is demand for zaptel, since they use a separate drive it's really not much of an issue for them to do this. Dahdi support within VICIDIAL should come along at some point this year, it's just that we haven't had an offer for paid support and testing for it yet so it's not that high on our list. Also, there are still some issues that exist with Dahdi that do not exist with zaptel(see the Digium issue tracker if you don't believe me on this one).

1.6 deprecated (and removed) the 'show channels concise' manager command. From what I have read of the VICI source, its a big deal.

Can VICIgroup confirm?

We haven't even tried 1.6 in a while. Until it becomes more stable even for light PBX users we won't integrate with it. When I start to see less than 2 "Asterisk 1.6 crashed" postings on the asterisk-users list and the Digium forums in a week I will take a look at it. But since it seems to crash from even basic functions randomly still at this point I don't think it's ready for VICIDIAL-type traffic.

Is show concise critical?

Getting a listing of channels is critical, but I'm pretty sure there will be some way of doing it in 1.6 even if that one particular command has been removed. That command has changed 4 times anyway, so it's not surprising that they are messing with it again.

Well put. I do wish they would stop.


To close it out:
Asterisk 1.6 lacks core manager interface compatibility with VICI

I am curious what kinds of issues vicidial has with with versions > 1.4.21.2. I ask because we're having a persistent problem with dropped calls (it's infrequent but we've never been able to completely get rid of them). After spending hours looking at tcpdump files and trying a couple things, I just bought a support contract with digium to help fix the problem, and the first thing they suggested was to upgrade to 1.4.24.1 because there are a lot of SIP-related fixes in versions beyond 1.4.21.2, and so we are considering an upgrade.

We have tested 1.4.24.1 and it seems OK in our tests(better than 1.4.22 or 1.4.23 for sure), but there is a rather annoying ERROR that shows up because for some reason Asterisk 1.4.24 now thinks that there is a problem to have manager connections closed within 10 seconds of logging out, which makes no sense because it doesn't cause an actual problem in any way, and it is certainly not worthy of an ERROR in Asterisk. But if you don't mind ignoring that ERROR it should be fine to use 1.4.24.1.

You know, in the earlier days I actually went to the trouble of altering a few of the "ERROR" and "WARNING" calls from asterisk because the things they thought were "ERROR" barely even qualified as a "NOTICE" in my book.

And the owner of the company I worked at watched the CLI for RED and would freak out and come running into my office if there was any ... something about not wanting to lose thousands of dollars on a shift if somethign went wrong with the dialer.

So I modified the C code and changed those stupid WARNINGS to NOTICES and *poof* no more red. Since I was on Gentoo, compiling anyway, it was not even a big deal.

But now I'm lazy (on the other hand ...)

If the problem persists and the Asterisk maintainers do not come to their senses then we will most likely write a patch to comment this out at some point in the future.

Hmm... I tried this a couple nights ago and I get this sort of thing:

[May 4 18:51:21] WARNING[7646]: res_agi.c:238 launch_netscript: Connect to 'agi://127.0.0.1:4577/call_log--HVcauses--PRI-----NODEBUG-----0---------------' failed: Resource temporarily unavailable
[May 4 18:52:01] ERROR[8138]: utils.c:966 ast_carefulwrite: write() returned error: Broken pipe

It's the first time i've ever seen something like that spit out by asterisk. The people on the dialer could manual call, and autodial showed the dialer as dialing numbers, but in the asterisk CLI i was not seeing numbers being dialed as I usually do. Did I do something wrong or did the asterisk API change and break something with vicidial (2.04 build 1066)?

If you guys got it working I'm wondering why it's not working for me. I configured everything as i usually do.