CD Installation of sipXecs
From SIPfoundry sipXecs IP PBX, The Open Source SIP PBX for Linux - Calivia
Using the sipXecs Single CD Installer
For RPM installation go to Installing sipX on Fedora and Centos.
Introduction
The sipXecs Single CD Installation medium was created to fully automate the installation process of both the Linux operating system as well as the sipXecs application.
As an optional configuration option the Installation CD offers to run additional system services on the same host. Such services include DHCP, DNS, as well as NTP servers. The configuration of these system services is automated using a configuration wizard that starts automatically as you login as root after installation. These services are optimized to run a sipXecs system. In particular the DHCP server is meant to configure phones and the DNS server is setup to offer SIP DNS SRV resource records.
Note: If there already is another DHCP server running on the subnet, operation of your network can go down if a second DHCP server comes online. Before you enable this option make sure no other DHCP server is on the subnet.
Once sipXecs is installed login to the Web UI, go to Diagnostics / Configuration Tests and run all the tests. Once the tests pass your network services are setup correctly to run sipXecs. This test is particularly helpful if you choose to run such network services on a different system, such as a Windows server.
Hardware Requirements
The Installation CD is made for standard Intel / AMD based systems (P4, Core Duo or equivalent) with a minimum of 512MB of RAM (more is recommended). It is not made for VIA CPUs (C3 or C7). For more detailed recommendations, see Hardware Requirements.
If the installer does not recognize your disk, you may be able to install by selecting the 'manual format' option.
Choice of Operating System
The single install CD currently is based on CentOS5 / i386 32 bit. There is also a 64 bit ISO available, but be aware that the 32 bit version is more extensively tested - using it would be the more conservative choice (there is no measurable performance or functional difference).
Obtaining and Burning the Installation CD Image
Stable Release: Download the CD from
- Stable and beta releases: http://sipxecs.sipfoundry.org/pub/sipXecs/ISO
Development CD builds:
- Development builds: http://sipxecs.sipfoundry.org/temp/sipXecs/ISO
Development builds are available for those who are impatient or wish to contribute testing to the project; note that development builds might not work at all. Be warned!
The downloaded ISO image needs to be written to a physical CD.
Booting the Installation CD
Insert the CD into your server and power it up. At the splash screen hit Enter to start the installation. Note that the installation will erase all data on your system. Once the installation finishes, the system will reboot automatically.
sipXecs System Configuration Wizard
At the login prompt login as user root. The password is setup.
Note: If you need to re-run the configuration wizard for any reason, run sipxecs-setup-system when logged in as root, but this may result in any previous configuration you have done being lost. Normally this is not needed - most parameters set by the installation wizard can be modified using the Web UI.
The first few screens set some basic system parameters:
- The password for the 'root' (administrator) account. This is needed only to log in to the command shell, which is normally not required - the sipXecs Web UI provides all the management you need. Enter a strong (hard-to-guess) password that you will not forget.
- Network parameters: the fully qualified host name (including the domain, such as sipxecs.example.com), the IP address, the subnet mask, and the default gateway IP address. The sipXecs services require a stable IP address - while it is possible to manually set up the system (not using this Wizard) to obtain these parameters using DHCP, it must always get the same answer, since some of this information is duplicated in the sipXecs configuration database and will not be changed by a DHCP change.
Providing DNS Service
The next screen asks:
Do you have a DNS server on another system?
If you do have an existing DNS server, answer Yes on this screen. After you have completed the bootstrap configuration and started sipXecs, navigate to the Diagnostics > DNS Advisor screen to get the DNS records that must be added to your configuration to support sipXecs.
If you do not have an existing DNS server, answer No on this screen, and the Wizard will create a configuration that provides DNS for your network from the server you are installing.
If you are installing a system to be added to an existing sipXecs system as a distributed server, answer Yes and when asked for the address of your DNS server, enter the address of your sipXecs master system (the one that is running the Web UI).
Configuring System Time
The Wizard prompts you for the time zone information for your server; this allows it to display times correctly in the Web UI and use various time-sensitive call routing features. It is possible to support phones in multiple time zones (when you configure phones, this can be set for any phone or group of phones).
After prompting for the time zone, the Wizard attempts to contact a set of default Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers to obtain the correct time (especially if it is unable to contact them, this may take some time to complete). If it is unable to contact the default servers (from the pool.ntp.org project), the Wizard will prompt you for the name or address of alternative servers, and if it fails to contact those, give you to opportunity to set the time manually.
It is important that the system time be set accurately - it makes correlating events much easier on any system. In a multiple-system sipXecs cluster, it is essential that all systems in the cluster use NTP to maintain synchronized clocks.
DHCP Service
On the next screen, the Wizard asks
You will need a DHCP server for your phones. Do you have a DHCP server on your network?
If you answer No, the Wizard configures the system you are setting up to be the master DHCP server for the network that you entered with the host information. This will cause problems if you already have a DHCP server running.
Once the system configuration above is completed, the Wizard begins the initial configuration that is specific to sipXecs.
sipXecs Initial Configuration
If you installed sipXecs using RPMs on an existing system instead of starting from the ISO image, and your system network and other services described above are already configured, you can begin the setup wizard here by running the service setup wizard as the root user from the command line:
sipxecs-setup
First System vs Additional System
sipXecs supports configurations in which the service are distributed on more than one server system. Some services support load-sharing and redundancy, and others can be configured on dedicated servers to provide higher performance or capacity.
The first screen in the sipXecs Initial Configuration Wizard asks whether this is the first sipXecs system you are configuring, or whether this is a system being added to an existing configuration.
Before adding a additional server using this Wizard, you must have configured the new system in the sipXecs Web UI. There are instructions on how to do this in the Web UI (System > Servers).
The following assumes that you are setting up your First system.
SIP Domain
SIP uses addresses that look (and act) much like an email address. Like email addresses, they have two parts separated by an '@' character: a user identifier and a domain name, like this:
sip:user@example.com
The 'user' part of an address may be a phone number, or may be a name like those used in email addresses (some users find it convenient to make a SIP address that is the same as their email address).
The next Wizard screen allows you to select the SIP domain name that is used in the right hand side of your SIP addresses. The domain should match the administrative scope of this system: if this is the sipXecs system for everyone in Example University, then the domain might be example.edu; if this is the sipXecs system for everyone working in the boston office of The Example Corporation, the domain might be boston.example.com. In any case, the name must be one that you can configure the DNS records for.
When configuration is completed, the Wizard starts the sipXecs service and displays a URL you can use to log in to the Web UI (especially following initial configuration, it can take some time for the Web UI to become available - please be patient).
If you did not configure your sipXecs server to be your DNS server, navigate to the Diagnostics > DNS Advisor screen to get the DNS records that must be added to your configuration to support sipXecs.
Logging into the sipXecs Configuration Server
Using a computer with network connectivity to the newly installed server, launch a Web browser and go to the URL below. The first screen asks for a new admin password to be defined.
http://<hostname.domain>
Managing Processes on the Master and Distributed Servers
After installing a multiple-server system all sipXecs processes on all servers in the cluster can be managed from the Web UI. Login to the Web UI as admin and navigate to System > Servers.
To manage the services on a system, select that system. Services can be monitored, stopped, started or restarted; any change you make to the state of a process is persistent (that is, if you stop a service it will not be started on subsequent system restarts, if you stop it then sipXecs will attempt to always run it).
Monitoring Phone Registrations in an HA-System
In a High Availability system, each phone may use either server system to register. The DNS SRV records control which systems the phones choose between; normally, these records specify load sharing distribution, so with two SIP Router systems there is a 50:50 chance of a phone using a given server. As soon as a phone registers with either server, sipXecs replicates the registration to the other server. Using the management Web UI you can see what phones registered on each server. The example below shows three phones, a Polycom, Snom and Grandstream, where two phones first registered with the 'test' server, and one first registered with 'test2'.
The Load Balance metric displayed below the counts of registered phones tells you how the registrations are distributed. Using the default evenly distributed configuration, it should be close to (difference < 0.15) the number of SIP Router servers you have configured; if it is not, then there may be some problem with communication between the phones and the server with fewer registrations. It can take some time (depending on how long your phones register for) for this ratio to return to normal if one server was down for some time, since it changes only when phone refresh their registrations.
Updating
You should use yum to keep your system updated. To configure the sipXecs yum repository execute the following command:
wget -P /etc/yum.repos.d http://www.sipfoundry.org/pub/sipXecs/sipxecs-stable-fc.repo
If you installed a non-stable release (any release with an odd minor release number - for example 3.11) make sure that you update it regularly and report problems on sipx-devel list.
In order to update the system to the latest nightly build execute the following command:
yum update --enablerepo=sipx-development
Troubleshooting
Refer to: SipX ConfigServer Troubleshooting
Log Files
The configuration wizard creates a detailed log of all the configuration options chosen during that step. It also logs all the settings of all the different files it writes to configure the system. The log file is at:
/var/log/sipxpbx/setup.log
In addition, during the installation Anaconda created an installation log that can be found in root's home directory. It shows all the packages installed on the system.
/root/install.log
Syslog protocols all the system messages during startup:
/var/log/messages
