So you have an Asterisk system running in production. Now what do you do?
Maintaining an Asterisk system can include tasks such as monitoring the system for issues, performing backups and keeping the system up to date. The topics of Asterisk Backups and Updating or Upgrading Asterisk are discussed on the linked sub-pages. A few miscellaneous maintenance topics are discussed below.
File sizes
Files generated by various Asterisk modules or core features may grow to significant sizes depending on how you use Asterisk and the configuration of those sub-systems.
Systems that may generate large files are:
- Logging
- Reporting
- Audio recording applications
- There are multiple ways to record audio files, applications such as MixMonitor exist for the purpose of audio recording, other applications, e.g. ConfBridge provide audio recording as a sub-feature. The recordings will either go to your default sounds directory (Specified in asterisk.conf) or a directory specified via the application or a configuration file related to the responsible module.
The key is to know where these components store their output and to have some mechanism in place to prevent the files from growing to a point where you have no storage space remaining.
Managing log files in general is outside the scope of this documentation, however a little Internet searching will get you a long way in that area.
The Directory and File Structure wiki page will tell you where most Asterisk files are stored on the Linux file-system.
Security
It is in the interest of every Asterisk administrator to perform due diligence for security concerns. Most security measures are a matter of configuration and prevention, however for a production system already running there are a few things to consider in the context of maintenance.
- The Asterisk Security Event Logger can generate log output for security events. You may want to monitor these manually or have scripts and applications that take action on these events or log messages.
- Be aware of security vulnerability announcements. There are a few places these are announced:
Interfaces for Monitoring Asterisk Status
Maintenance can mean keeping an eye on the system and its state. The wiki discusses Asterisk interfaces, such as SNMP or APIs such as AMI. Through these interfaces you can monitor Asterisk in a variety of ways or even affect control over calls.