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 from 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...