On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 08:27 +1000, Josh Marshall wrote:
> My memory is a bit hazy, but when I was watching dns requests with
> tcpdump when I first installed sipX (a few months back now) the sipX
> server performs SRV lookups, and if they fail, perform A lookups.
> 
> The thing I'm not certain of is whether the sipX will cache lookups /
> choose a different gateway each time (I assume this is what you want by
> load balance). I do believe that for high availability you're better to
> put the two gateways in the config because if sipX fails connecting to
> the gateway it will fail the call, rather than try the next gateway when
> the DNS returns multiple results.

sipX handles SRV records like it should.  It can cache the DNS lookups,
but even then, it does a proper randomization every time that it uses
the DNS records to send a message to a destination.

Having multiple gateways is a little more complicated.  From SIP's point
of view, a DNS name is a destination, and if DNS gives more than one
address for it, those are alternative routes to the *same device*.  So
sipX will try each address in turn until it gets a response.

If you have two gateways, and you put both their addresses onto one DNS
name, sipX will try both addresses if it has to.  If the first gateway
is *down*, sipX will try the second gateway.  But if the first gateway
is *busy*, it will send a 486 (or some other failure response), and
sipX, having gotten a response from "the device", won't attempt to
contact "the device" using the second address.

Unfortunately, fallback between redundant gateways is difficult to
handle well in SIP.

Dale


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