[Users] OpenSER not working after running for several days

[Max Gregorian]

I too am running a number of openser servers in a production environment and
have experienced similar problems, but they normally came to the fore after
making a seemingly minor change in the config file (something silly like
adding a comment). I would then try to restart openser and it would fail to
start. I would then roll back to the previous working config and discover
that openser was refusing to accept that too. Needless to say, in a live
environment with customers screaming about service not working, this can be
quite stressful.

After a few of these experiences, I have come to realise that it seems as
though once loaded into memory and running, openser "caches" the config file
and also does not appear to re-check for changes in network conditions. As
such, for example, if your openser server is responsible for a particular
domain name mapped to say a certain public ip and you were to change the
public ip via your domain name registrar, your openser server will still be
running (i.e. you will see the running processes in *ps* and the pid file,
and *openserctl moni* will still show openser as running etc.) But then, if
you were to restart openser, it would then fail to start because the new
changes have now kicked in, and you could spend an age wondering what you
have changed.

In particular, I have had similar DNS problems as Richard mentioned above
though mine were not due to NIC speed settings as I always force the NIC
speed settings on the server using *ethtool*, since our network uses fixed
network speed settings. My DNS issues were more to do with the fact that we
were using internal DNS servers on our network which seemed to be affecting
how openser was resolving domain names. I will try and post if I find a
solution.



On 10/19/06, Richard Bennett <richard.bennett at skynet.be> wrote:
>
> On Thursday 19 October 2006 09:40, Papadopoulos Georgios wrote:
> > A couple of weeks ago, in an effort to solve the problem I upgraded from
> > 1.0 to 1.1. It ran fine for several days but eventually the same thing
> > happened. I have no idea what to check for. Has anyone else seen this
> > problem? Is there anything I can do to figure this out?
>
> I had a similar problem, where it looked like the openser slowed down, and
> then stopped accepting calls.
> It got so bad I had to setup sipsak to send a message to the server every
> minute, and send a message to my phone when it didn't get a reply.
> In the end it turned out it was being caused by the server not having a
> working DNS setting configuired in its network settings. Even though i had
> dns=no and rev_dns=no in the openser config, it seems something was trying
> to
> look-up the aliases that that server itself was listening on, or the realm
> of
> the clients...
> It would run ok, but it was as though the multitude of failed dns lookups
> would finally halt the system, or something...
> Anyway, after setting-up dns properly it was fine.
> Another time I had something similar where the server seemed to slow way
> down,
> I had to lock-down the network card to 10mbit full-duplex. It was
> autoselecting 100mbit half-duplex.
> Hope that helps someone... sometime...
>
> Richard.
>
>
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