Today I had a brief power outage which caused the Asterisk server and DSL modem to reboot. The Asterisk server came up before the internet connection was working, so it failed when try to look up some of the hosts for my outbound voip providers in sip.conf.

Asterisk never recovered from that, i.e. it never retried so those providers were unavailable. The only provider that was still available was one that I had entered the IP address for, rather than the host name.

Have any of you run into this issue, and if so, how have you solved it? It seems that since Asterisk periodically tries to reregister it should also retry the DNS lookup at the same time, rather than never trying again if the lookup fails. This would indicate that Asterisk would also fail if the voip provider changed the IP address of its server because Asterisk would never see the new IP address.

Here are some workarounds I thought of, but none of them are particularly good:

1) Get a UPS so my machines won't reboot when the power fails. This actually might not solve anything, because I'm connected to a remote DSLAM in my neighborhood that I believe does not have backup power, so it won't work when the power is out. But perhaps Asterisk is more robust after it has booted (I'll have to test this).

2) Change all host names in sip.conf to IP addresses. This is kind of ugly and also will break when a voip provider changes their IP address. There is a reason for DNS!

3) Have a cron job send asterisk periodic "sip reload" commands.

4) Delay the start of asterisk until the internet connection has come up. This could cause me to be without any phones if there is any delay or failure in bringing up the network (I also have zap channels and PSTN lines).

5) A hybrid of ideas 3 and 4 above: Have a startup script that waits for the internet connection to come up, and then sends a "sip reload" command to Asterisk.

Any other ideas?

John
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