My intent is to do SIP load balancing using a layer 4 hardware switch (such as a Foundry ServerIron XL) or a layer 4 software switch (such as UltraMonkey).
Since SER *could* operate in a completely stateless mode it could serve as a per packet proxy in front of a series of stateful feature servers such as Asterisk. A L4 device by itself would not be enough and a stateless MUST be in front to do the actually balancing because of SIP's flaw/design of containing routing information throughout the packets life. It would have been nicer if it only carried a source and destination and worked more like TCP/IP but unfortunately it is what it is.
Anyway, I about have everything working and I only seem to have a small issue when the second SER server comes online with some strange message passing between them. Most of it I believe is caused by my lack of understanding of how SER makes some decisions on where to send things. I think what would help is if I setup a "work in progress" web site that would show all my config files and the layout of the whole thing along with an explanation of why I decided to do what I did. I should have it up later today or tomorrow.
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Michael Shuler, C.E.O. BitWise Communications, Inc. (CLEC) And BitWise Systems, Inc. (ISP) 682 High Point Lane East Peoria, IL 61611 Office: (217) 585-0357 Cell: (309) 657-6365 Fax: (309) 213-3500 E-Mail: mike@bwsys.net Customer Service: (877) 976-0711
-----Original Message----- From: Jiri Kuthan [mailto:jiri@iptel.org] Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 5:42 PM To: Michael Shuler; serusers@lists.iptel.org Cc: jan@iptel.org Subject: RE: [Serusers] forward() and t_relay() differences
At 07:50 PM 10/4/2004, Michael Shuler wrote:
Sorry if that first line sounded snotty, I didn't mean it
that way. I
didn't read it until after I sent it. What I meant to say
was thank you for
the response.
you are very welcome.
I had already been through the docs though and found that too but I was still seeing the following problem..
I am interestd in more feedback on load-balancers. To my knowledge, it is a technology which has some conflicts with SIP protocol and those LBs that try to fix the problems using built-in SIP awareness don't do necessarily any better. We are working on a SER built-in load-balancing architecture but that's still work in progress.
-jiri