Maintenance and Security

IRC becomes a valid support mechanism when we need quick short answers to our problems or a quick sanity check on something we intend to do. It is often difficult to solve complex problems on IRC especially those that require long detailed explanations or which extend over large portions of our configuration files. It's often easier to explain such matters in an email to a list. However IRC is good for quick replies and for question and answer sessions, so it shouldn't be overlooked.

Digium

Digium provides a variety of services relating to the installation and running of Asterisk, from email and telephone support to on-site support contracts. We should evaluate the need and benefit of this as we decide which kind of support we need. For example if we have a full-time Asterisk administrator or team, we probably wouldn't require much support: maybe email support for occasional troubles, but the mailing lists could possibly provide enough.

If, however, we are employed as a single administrator in an SME we would benefit from having official support mechanisms on hand, although in reality the spread of support is usually the other way around, with SMEs winging it and larger companies having too much support. We also have to consider cost; unofficial community support will obviously be cheaper than paid commercial support. We should evaluate our needs carefully and ensure that we have the necessary support in place to maintain our Asterisk system.

Summary

The phone system of any modern business is something that, if it works well, should be almost invisible to its users. We want them to take it for granted, and to use its features without thinking. It's inevitable and even desirable that our users should come to depend on the services the system offers. Naturally therefore, we want to minimize any disruption to the system, and to make sure that, in the event of a failure, normal service can be resumed as smoothly and quickly as possible.

In this chapter, we've looked at how to be prepared for such an eventuality, by performing regular and systematic backups. We also looked at making a Disaster Recovery Plan, which can help to minimize the time taken to get the system back online.

Of course, the best way to minimize disruption from service outages is to prevent them happening in the first place. To this end, we have looked at how to make Asterisk more robust and how to harden it against attack.

Not all failures are the result of malicious activity, however, and we've also covered a few issues that you should consider in order to make Asterisk scale well. Finally, the community support channels are invaluable in keeping your Asterisk system well maintained and running efficiently, as well as providing help should you ever get stuck. The last section of this chapter was devoted to coverage of these various channels.

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