Telium Support Group

Since the above post was written 1 year ago, the market trend has reversed and we are seeing more companies move their PBX’s off the cloud and back on-premise. Reasons vary but we have frequently heard that audio problems (due to latency) are forcing the return of PBX to a hardware platform under full control of the operator.

On the high-end, cloud providers like AWS (even on their XL platform) are encountering latency problems at approximately 250 simultaneous calls. This number is not consistent but as of October 2017 we have heard from numerous large scale providers that AWS is not consistently reliable for large deployments. (Although we have a couple of HAAst users with well in excess of that number of calls on a single AWS instance). There appear to be variations by host/data center/region affecting performance.

Telium continues to support any combination of on-premise, cloud, and hybrid. Telium would be pleased to assist with the design of any telephony environment, building on the experience of a wide range of customers.

Following a press release by one of our clients our traffic has spiked and our web host is overloaded. (As of Oct 16 2017). We have contacted our hosting company and requested additional bandwidth. Our web site should become more responsive on October 18 2017 and you should be able to view/download normally again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

We do not offer a prepackaged SUSE(TM) distribution of HAAst due to lower market share of SUSE. As you can see (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions), there are hundreds of different Linux distributions and we could not possibly create packages (or installation instructions) for them all.

We do however offer a custom build service included with the Commercial Unlimited edition of HAAst. So if you purchase multiple HAAst Commercial Unlimited licenses we will create a build for SUSE LES 12 SP3 (the most current as of this date) or whichever variation you require. If you just want to experiment with the free edition of HAAst but aren’t familiar with other Linux distributions, you may wish to create a VM with CentOS + our software.

Based on calls to our support team the number and nature of support requests relates directly to the level of Linux and Asterisk expertise of the administrator performing the installation. We would estimate the expertise of administrators who install our products as follows:

As a result approximately

• 50% of our customers never call/email during installation; they perform the whole installation and we only hear from them when they need their license activation. (These are the Linux & Asterisk admins)
• 20% of customers get stuck early in the installation and are confused by a lot of the technical steps.
• 30% are somewhere in the middle, but most of those have issues/questions relating to networking, Linux commands, etc.. (These are people with a bit of Windows and Linux admin experience).

The first group (50%) usually don’t need any support or additional professional services from Telium. The second group (20%) normally need us to perform the full installation (purchasing 4 hours of assistance typically). The third group (30%) sometimes use up their support incidents quickly, and we recommend purchasing 2-4 hours of support depending on the degree of assistance required.

Note: Of the Windows Admin (30%) group above, a few admins get stuck early in the installation and get very frustrated with Linux, Asterisk, HAAst, or our support reps (but they refuse to purchase assistance as they are very confident in their abilities). We try very hard to assist every customer – but it’s not always possible for a Linux novice to install our products. (Please consider purchasing support assistance, or reevaluate your need for HA)

• This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by WebMaster.

And as of August 1 2017 we officially support Debian 9.

Please note that we only build 64 bit packages for newer distributions like Debian 9 / Ubuntu 16. If you require a 32 bit version for a recent OS please contact Telium support.

Yes. You can grant users limited monitoring and control capabilities through

1. a LCD interface on the PBX (built in). HAAst supports LCD interfaces (see installation guide for models), and you can enabled control such that an end user can promote/demote a peer from the keypad on the front of the PBX. They can also confirm status, monitor synchronizations are happening, etc. from the LCD display.
2. a simple web UI (which controls HAAst through the REST interface)

The only time we have seen this problem is when some hardware is not being consistently detected by the BIOS (intermittent hardware), or the hardware changes the profile presented to Linux (e.g.: changing MAC address, changing CPU type, etc).

We can help you find the hardware causing this problem. Please submit two license request files: One from when the license is accepted, and one from when the license is rejected. We will run a comparison through our licensing tool and it will tell us what is different.

If FreePBX is not too badly damaged (i.e. it has not messed up its own settings) you may be able to recover by just copying the full database with schema from the working node to the defective node. This assume you have followed all of the other advice in the installation guide regarding FreePBX modules/versions/etc.

If not, the Telium support team has tools to attempt to realign the two FreePBX installations. These tools move files/directories/databases/links etc to attempt to make FreePBX identical on both peers. Because of the potential to really make of mess of the peers, Telium does not offer these tools to the public. Instead you would need to purchase 2 hours of service (from the Buy tab) and grant direct SSH access to each peer. That’s usually the quickest route to recovery, but doesn’t always guarantee success (depending how badly the second peer is damaged).

If you want to recover the systems on your own, the next quickest way to recover your cluster is to mirror the primary PBX disk to the secondary PBX disk, and then adjust settings on the secondary to turn it into a unique peer. (Network settings, host name, and HAAst settings). Using ‘dd’ (or Ghost4Linux) is the easiest way to mirror the disk. Keep the secondary PBX unplugged from the network throughout this recovery, and resume at step 2 of the link you posted above.

After that your cluster will be up and running again!

In the future, I suggest you follow the HAAst Maintenance Guide before you apply any updates, or enable any FreePBX modules. Fortunately this problem is appears to be unique to FreePBX, as all other Asterisk based PBX’s we have encountered which use MySQL databases seem to detect any code-database mismatches and allow the user to simply UPDATE the configuration generator to recover.

Treat the FreePBX program as very fragile – so follow the upgrade instructions. As well, be sure to disable Automatic Updates in FreePBX as this too can cause problems.