Vocati Communications, Inc.

Archive for the ‘Technical VoIP FAQ and Blog’ Category

VoIP Servers For As Low As $19.95 per month from Vocati Communications!

Vocati Communications is running a special on all Servers including virtual servers and physical servers right now.

Hosted Switches and Servers – Starting at $19.95 per month – TURNKEY!

Vocati Server

Why pay for bandwidth at a location that is always going down taking your business offline?  Get your turnkey switch, co-located server or PBX with us.  Guaranteed uptime!

Unlike other providers, we do not limit the use of your server.  Use it for whatever you want!  Switch, PBX, Email, Web Servers, VoIP Server, Corporate Switch, Turnkey Calling Card Platform.  We offer it all!

The following configurations and monthly prices are available:

**Free initial configuration setup including trunks and testing to Vocati!

Additional upgrades and changes available upon request.

We will install most major open operating systems on your server.

Available Operating Sytstems

• PBX in a Flash
  

• Trixbox CE 2.x

• A2Billing Calling Card Platform

• Centos 5.2 with Asterisk 1.4 installed

• Freeswitch

• Elastix

• OpenSIPS

• OpenSER

• Plain CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, or Gentoo

Additional Cost Installations:

• CDRTool

• Media Proxy

• FreeRadius

• Custom Billing or VoIP Services

Server Colocation
Server colocation offered on an individual case basis. Space may be purchased by units of rackspace or cabinets start at $499 per month.

* Free bandwidth offered so long as server is only used for processing VoIP calls on Vocati’s or iCall’s network. Servers using bandwidth over three megabits for calls on other voip providers or hosting will be billed at $50 per Mbit based on 95% network billing rules. IRC is prohibited.

** As a one time courtesy, upon request, Vocati will setup your new server to authenticate with our switch and verify that it is able to make and receive calls. This applies to any VoIP technology. Customer is responsible for final configuration and ongoing management or Vocati can provide consulting services at a pre-agreed rate.  Contact us for more details.

Performance issues with A2Billing

Asterisk: optimizing a2billing mysql database with more than 1,000,000 rates in cc_ratecard

UPDATE: We just found out that the index we are talking about will be added to the next a2billing release. We have been told that the index is already part of the source repository now as of rev 2419.

Like many other people, we have experienced performance problems with a2billing ( asterisk2billing ) when our cc_ratecard table reached 1,000,000 rows.

We have surfed around the internet to find solutions to fix this problem. We found several solutions, some suggesting to split the cc_ratecard table into multiple tables in order to fix things. Nevertehless, we figured that there must be another way and there was indeed another way. Click below to read more…

Second, there is a missing index in the cc_ratecard that you can easily add yourself. This change alone will speed up things by a factor of about 10 from what we have found:

The column  idtariffplan (the one that could be moved to a separate table as mentioned above in our first point) in the cc_ratecard table doesn’t have any indexes.

Just add an index to this column to speed up things by a factor of around 10:

mysql>  create index idtariffplan_index on cc_ratecard (idtariffplan);

Et voila !!

Third make sure your mysql database itself is optimized for large tables. As example see the my.huge file content that is distributed with mysql  below.

A2billing is now running smootly with over 1,000,000 rates in cc_ratecard !

my-huge.cnf :

# Example MySQL config file for very large systems.
#
# This is for a large system with memory of 1G-2G where the system runs mainly
# MySQL.
#
# You can copy this file to
# /etc/my.cnf to set global options,
# mysql-data-dir/my.cnf to set server-specific options (in this
# installation this directory is /var/lib/mysql) or
# ~/.my.cnf to set user-specific options.
#
# In this file, you can use all long options that a program supports.
# If you want to know which options a program supports, run the program
# with the “–help” option.

# The following options will be passed to all MySQL clients
[client]
#password       = your_password
port            = 3306
socket          = /var/run/mysql/mysql.sock

# Here follows entries for some specific programs

# The MySQL server
[mysqld]
port            = 3306
socket          = /var/run/mysql/mysql.sock
skip-locking
key_buffer = 384M
max_allowed_packet = 1M
table_cache = 512
sort_buffer_size = 2M
read_buffer_size = 2M
read_rnd_buffer_size = 8M
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 64M
thread_cache_size = 8
query_cache_size = 32M
# Try number of CPU’s*2 for thread_concurrency
thread_concurrency = 8

# Don’t listen on a TCP/IP port at all. This can be a security enhancement,
# if all processes that need to connect to mysqld run on the same host.
# All interaction with mysqld must be made via Unix sockets or named pipes.
# Note that using this option without enabling named pipes on Windows
# (via the “enable-named-pipe” option) will render mysqld useless!
#
#skip-networking

# Replication Master Server (default)
# binary logging is required for replication
log-bin

# required unique id between 1 and 2^32 – 1
# defaults to 1 if master-host is not set
# but will not function as a master if omitted
server-id       = 1

# Replication Slave (comment out master section to use this)
#
# To configure this host as a replication slave, you can choose between
# two methods :
#
# 1) Use the CHANGE MASTER TO command (fully described in our manual) -
#    the syntax is:
#
#    CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST=<host>, MASTER_PORT=<port>,
#    MASTER_USER=<user>, MASTER_PASSWORD=<password> ;
#
#    where you replace <host>, <user>, <password> by quoted strings and
#    <port> by the master’s port number (3306 by default).
#
#    Example:
#
#    CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST=’125.564.12.1′, MASTER_PORT=3306,
#    MASTER_USER=’joe’, MASTER_PASSWORD=’secret’;
#
# OR
#
# 2) Set the variables below. However, in case you choose this method, then
#    start replication for the first time (even unsuccessfully, for example
#    if you mistyped the password in master-password and the slave fails to
#    connect), the slave will create a master.info file, and any later
#    change in this file to the variables’ values below will be ignored and
#    overridden by the content of the master.info file, unless you shutdown
#    the slave server, delete master.info and restart the slaver server.
#    For that reason, you may want to leave the lines below untouched
#    (commented) and instead use CHANGE MASTER TO (see above)
#
# required unique id between 2 and 2^32 – 1
# (and different from the master)
# defaults to 2 if master-host is set
# but will not function as a slave if omitted
#server-id       = 2
#
# The replication master for this slave – required
#master-host     =   <hostname>
#
# The username the slave will use for authentication when connecting
# to the master – required
#master-user     =   <username>
#
# The password the slave will authenticate with when connecting to
# the master – required
#master-password =   <password>
#
# The port the master is listening on.
# optional – defaults to 3306
#master-port     =  <port>
#
# binary logging – not required for slaves, but recommended
#log-bin

# Point the following paths to different dedicated disks
#tmpdir         = /tmp/
#log-update     = /path-to-dedicated-directory/hostname

# Uncomment the following if you are using BDB tables
#bdb_cache_size = 384M
#bdb_max_lock = 100000

# Uncomment the following if you are using InnoDB tables
#innodb_data_home_dir = /var/lib/mysql/
#innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:2000M;ibdata2:10M:autoextend
#innodb_log_group_home_dir = /var/lib/mysql/
#innodb_log_arch_dir = /var/lib/mysql/
# You can set .._buffer_pool_size up to 50 – 80 %
# of RAM but beware of setting memory usage too high
#innodb_buffer_pool_size = 384M
#innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M
# Set .._log_file_size to 25 % of buffer pool size
#innodb_log_file_size = 100M
#innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M
#innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1
#innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50

[mysqldump]
quick
max_allowed_packet = 16M

[mysql]
no-auto-rehash
# Remove the next comment character if you are not familiar with SQL
#safe-updates

[isamchk]
key_buffer = 256M
sort_buffer_size = 256M
read_buffer = 2M
write_buffer = 2M

[myisamchk]
key_buffer = 256M
sort_buffer_size = 256M
read_buffer = 2M
write_buffer = 2M

[mysqlhotcopy]
interactive-timeout