Long Silence at the Start of Inbound Calls

It's my first time setting up an inbound call and I ran into a problem where after the initial 2 rings, there's a long silence before the greeting plays. The longest was 17 seconds!

If I were the customer and there was no sound for 17 seconds, I'd hang up immediately. Customers hanging up mid-way isn't a good thing, of course.

Here are the steps I did to remedy the situation:

1. Make sure the DID points to the IP address you need: It will take longer to route the calls to the right place if you have 2 or more servers. I had our DID provider remove the 4 other unnecessary IP addresses which shaved off 10 seconds.
2. [Update: Don't do this! I ended up having a lot of outbound calls dropped because asterisk couldn't find this file] Remove sip-silence.gsm from the sequence: Observing asterisk logs, when an inbound call arrives, sip-silence.gsm is played twice before the first greeting. I'm too scared to tinker with the asterisk script (it's a really long text of code) and remove the 2 lines of sip-silence. Instead, I just renamed sip-silence.gsm into sip-silence2.gsm so it would skip playing that file. This shaved off another 3 seconds. Aside from removing sip-silence.gsm, I was thinking of replacing it with a ringing sound. However, I can't find the default ringing sound in the asterisk folder, so I chose to just remove sip-silence.gsm instead.

From 17 seconds of long silence, I was able to cut it down to 4 seconds of silence.

Converting Sound Files to WAV for Vicidial

I felt like I should post what settings I put in to convert sound files to .wav for Vicidial (For call menus and voicemail greeting). I did it the last time, but I forgot it today. Now, I'm taking down notes so I won't forget in the future.

Link to Online Converter:
http://audio.online-convert.com/convert-to-wav

Settings Needed:

• Change Bit Resolution: 16 Bit
• Change Sampling Rate: 8000 Hz
• Change Audio Channels: Mono
• PCM Format (Under advanced options): PCM Unsigned 8-bit

Anything else higher than this won't work.

Audio Store is Just A White Box

I encountered the "plain white box" error upon clicking any link in the administration which mentions "audio chooser". I also mysteriously found that by clicking this and having the white box issue, the disk space runs out quickly and I have to delete the logs.

By following the instructions here, I was able to fix the problem.
http://striker24x7.blogspot.com/2014/06/vicidial-goautodial-audio-store-white.html

Turns out, the directory that Vicidial was pointing to did not exist. I needed to create the folder and made sure the permissions were okay.

Now, upon clicking the Audio Chooser, this pops up!

P.S. Striker 24x7 - I <3 you!

There is a time synchronization problem with your system [Unsolved]

While calls were happening, the system stopped calling. The error message was "There is a time synchronization problem with your system, please tell your system administrator".

It could be a number of errors, but according to our provider, it was because our RAM wasn't working anymore. The server was 2 years old and was used every weekday since then.

When I replaced the RAM, it was working again for a while. But then the problem came back.

Until now, I still don't know why the error happens and I haven't been able to get back to it.

No MySQL.sock because Root Partition is 100% Full

Last week our Vicidial Server crashed and our agents couldn't make calls anymore. After restarting the server and trying to do the ol' rename-mysql.sock solution, I found that the mysql.sock file was missing. What gives??!

When I try to access the agent page in Vicidial, the error was: "MySQL connect ERROR: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)". Normally, I would follow the process of renaming or deleting the existing mysql.sock file then restart the mysql service. However, this time, there was no mysql.sock. (Impt: Please DO NOT delete the mysql! They are not the same as mysql.sock!)

After checking with the provider, turns out that the root partition is already full. Here are the steps that the provider gave to resolve the issue.

Steps and SSH commands:

1. Find out how much space you have left.
   SSH Command: df -h
   In the Admin Page, go to "Reports" and scroll down and look for "Disk". It should provide the percentage of use.
2. Delete unwanted files. In this case, you can delete the .WAV duplicates. It won't delete your .MP3 recordings.
   SSH Command:
   rm -f /var/spool/asterisk/monitorDONE/ORIG/*.wav
   rm -f /var/log/httpd/*
3. Restart the server via SSH. Do not just push the power button or pull the plug.
   SSH Command: sudo reboot

And there you go! If that still doesn't work but you have the mysql.sock file already, follow the old process of renaming or deleting the existing mysql.sock file then restart the mysql service. 

Using a Back-up Vicidial Server

As part of risk management of operations, there may be times when your main Vicidial Server conks out. Because I want to be proactive and not get caught with my pants down, I got a second Vicidial Server.

I want to share with you what I do.

First, I do a MySQL dump of the primary server then upload the MySQL back-up to the secondary server. For me, it's not mission-critical to have an exact duplicate, so I just do this weekly. For some, they may prefer to do this hourly or daily. 

Second, since my primary and secondary server do not have the same IP address, I do the IP-address-update command ("/usr/share/astguiclient/ADMIN_update_server_ip.pl") in Linux SSH. The mysql-migration will copy the primary server's IP address in the mysql database to the secondary server, so it's important to adjust it back to the correct IP address.

These 2 steps can be created as batch-jobs so you don't have to manually do this if you prefer.

There you have it! Hope this was helpful.