Once the sip:provider PRO is in production, security and maintenance becomes really important. In this chapter, we’ll go through a set of best practices for any production system.
The sip:provider PRO provides SSH access to the system for Sipwise operational team for debugging and final tuning. Operational team uses user sipwise which can be logged in through SSH key only (password access is disabled) from dedicated access server jump.sipwise.com only.
To completely remove Sipwise access to your system, please execute as user root:
root@myserver:~# ngcp-support-access --disable && apt-get install ngcp-support-noaccess
you have to execute the command above on each node of your sip:provider PRO system! |
please ensure that the script complete successfully: |
* Support access successfully disabled.
If you need to restore Sipwise access to the system, please execute as user root:
root@myserver:~# apt-get install ngcp-support-access && ngcp-support-access --enable
please ensure that the script complete successfully: |
* Support access successfully enabled.
The sip:provider PRO runs a wide range of services. Some of them need to interact with the user, while some others need to interact with the administrator or with nobody at all. Assuming that we trust the sip:provider PRO server for outgoing connections, we’ll focus only on incoming traffic to define the services that need to be open for interaction.
Table 7. Subscribers
Service | Default port | Config option |
---|---|---|
Customer self care interface | 443 TCP | www_admin→http_csc→port |
SIP | 5060 UDP, TCP | kamailio→lb→port |
SIP over TLS | 5061 TCP | kamailio→lb→tls→port + kamailio→lb→tls→enable (Disabled by default) |
RTP | 30000-40000 UDP | rtpproxy→minport + rtpproxy→maxport |
XCAP | 1080 TCP | kamailio→proxy→presence→enable + nginx→xcap_port (Disabled by default) |
XMPP | 5222 and 5269 TCP | None, standard XMPP ports for clients (5222) and federation (5269) |
Table 8. Administrators
Service | Default port | Config option |
---|---|---|
SSH/SFTP | 22 TCP | NA |
Administrator interface | 1443 TCP | www_admin→http_admin→port |
Provisioning interfaces | 2443 TCP | ossbss→apache→port |
To function correctly, the rtpengine requires an additional iptables rule installed. This rule (with a target of |
The sip:provider PRO comes with some default passwords the user should change during the deployment of the system. They have been explained in the previous chapters of this document.
Many NGCP services use MySQL backend. Users and passwords for these services are created during the installation. These passwords are unique for each installation, and the connections are restricted to localhost. You should not change these users and passwords. |
The sip:provider PRO provides default, self-signed SSL certificates for SSL connections. These certificates are common for every installation. Before going to production state, the system administrator should provide SSL certificates for the web services. These certificates can either be shared by all web interfaces (provisioning, administrator interface and customer self care interface), or separate ones for each them can be used.
Set the path to the new certificates in /etc/ngcp-config/config.yml:
The sip:provider PRO also provides the self-signed SSL certificates for SIP over TLS services. The system administrator should replace them with certificates signed by a trusted certificate authority if he is going to enable it for the production usage (kamailio→lb→tls→enable (disabled by default)).
Set the path to the new certificates in /etc/ngcp-config/config.yml:
The sip:provider PRO can be integrated with most of the existing backup solutions. While it does not provide any backup system by default, any Debian compatible system can be installed. It’s not the scope of this chapter to go through backup system configuration. We’ll focus on which information needs to be saved.
The minimum set of information to be backed up is:
This is the most important data in the system. All subscriber information, billing, CDRs, user preferences etc. are stored in the MySQL server. A periodical dump of all the databases should be performed.
/etc/ngcp-config/config.yml, /etc/ngcp-config/constants.yml, /etc/ngcp-config/network.yml and /etc/mysql/sipwise.cnf files, where your specific system configurations are stored, should be included in the backup as well. Saving the entire /etc/ngcp-config folder is a good idea in general.
The directory /home/jail/home/cdrexport contains the exported CDRs the system has generated so far. It depends on your local call data retention policy whether or not to remove these files after exporting them to an external system.
Any custom configurations, like modified templates or additionally implemented services which are not provided by the sip:provider PRO
In the worst case scenario, when the system needs to be recovered from a total loss, you only need 4 steps to get back online:
To reset database to its original state you can use the script provided by CE: * Execute ngcp-reset-db. It will assign new unique password for the NGCP services and restart all services. IMPORTANT: All existing data will be wiped out without possibility of restoring.
In case of unresolvable database replication issues or to copy mysql data between a pair of hosts (usually a pair of sp1 and sp2 nodes).
There is a script for that: ngcp-sync-db.
To synchronize databases you need to run the script on your target host.
Definitions:
Your existing database on local will be completely wiped. The script provides a possibility to backup both master and local databases during the procedure. |
You can run the script with -h
or --help
to check its options or use man ngcp-sync_db
If you run it without any options it automatically calculates master hostname (e.g. if you run it on sp2 then sp2==local and sp1==master).
The script also requires mysql credentials and if none provided it uses username=sipwise and the password is picked from /etc/mysql/sipwise.cnf. You can specify user and/or password for both master and local.
Before the actual start it produces a summary with settings used to the procedure and a confirmation prompt to prevent accidental usage. Making use of --force
option" however suppresses the confirmation prompt.
By default no messages are printed on STDOUT (compliant to be integrated into another tools)
and with -v
or --verbose
options you enable debugging where all the ongoing steps will be printed to STDOUT.
There are 2 modes avaialble for synchronization, online and backup. By default online is used where the procedure does not create any backups and everything goes on the fly. That is useful for large databases where creating backups would require solid amounts of avaialble free disk space. With the backup mode master db is dumped into a backup file on local first (default directory: /var/backup/ngcp-sync-db) and imported upon the backup completion.
Mysql database connection to the master db and the local db is the essential part and by default the script tries to establish direct mysql connection however that may not be possible due to the access restrictions. To overcome that you can use --ssh-tunnel
option and specifying there a local custom free port (e.g. --ssh-tunnel=33125
) in this case an ssh tunnel will be created to master and used to establish the db connection on the localhost behalf (NOTE: Public key based ssh negotiation is required for the tunnel as the script does not suppot ssh credentials for security reasons).
Backups may be a subject to create during synchornization for possible rollbacks. To create the local db backup you should add --local-backup
. The master db backup is automatically created only using --sync-mode=backup
. Upon completion all those created backups are deleted and if you need to keep them please use --keep-backups
option (NOTE: In case of errors during synchronization and when backups are created they are NOT automatically deleted. Therefore, if the script had failed with an error and afterwards completed successully you may want to manually remove the remaining backups from /var/backup/ngcp-sync-db).
Normal online mode synchronization sp1 → sp2.
sp2> ngcp-sync-db
Normal backup mode synchronization sp1 → sp2.
sp2> ngcp-sync-db --sync-mode=backup
Forced online mode synchronization sp1 → sp2. USE WITH CARE as there will be no confirmation prompts.
sp2> ngcp-sync-db --force
Direct mysql db access is not possible. SSH tunnel is initialised to local port 33125 and forwards all connections 127.0.0.1:33125 → sp1:3306.
sp2> ngcp-sync-db --ssh-tunnel=33125
Custom mysql credentials for the master db connection (by default: sipwise:/etc/mysql/sipwise.cnf)
sp2> ngcp-sync-db --master-user=frank --master-pass=dbconnect
Normal online mode synchronization sp1 → sp2 with the local db backup and retaining the backup. (no master backup in this case as it is only avaiable with --sync-mode=backup
).
sp2> ngcp-sync-db --local-backup --keep-backups
Normal online mode synchronization custom-node → sp2 with ssh tunnel
sp2> ngcp-sync-db --master-host=custom-node --ssh-tunnel=45001
Forced syncrhonization custom-node → sp2 with ssh tunnel, backup sync mode, local backup, custom master and local db credentials and ports as well as a different backup dir
sp2> ngcp-sync-db --force --sync-mode=backup --master-host=custom-node --master-port=3308 --ssh-tunnel=45001 --master-user=frank --master-pass=dbconnect --local-user=john --local-pass=dblocal --local-backup --keep-backups --backup-dir=/home/barry/backups
The sip:provider PRO is a very flexible system, capable of serving from hundreds to several tens of thousands of subscribers in a single node. The system comes with a default configuration, capable of serving up to 50.000 subscribers in a normal environment. But there is no such thing as a normal environment. And the sip:provider PRO has sometimes to be tunned for special environments, special hardware requirements or just growing traffic.
If you have performance issues with regards to disk I/O please consider enabling the noatime mount option for the root filesystem. Sipwise recommends the usage of noatime, though remove it if you use software which conflicts with its presence. |
In this section some parameters will be explained to allow the sip:provider PRO administrator tune the system requirements for optimum performance.
Table 9. Requirement_options
Option | Default value | Requirement impact |
---|---|---|
cleanuptools→binlog_days | 15 | Heavy impact on the harddisk storage needed for mysql logs. It can help to restore the database from backups or restore broken replication. |
database→bufferpoolsize | 1/2 * Total system RAM | The installer will calculate the total system RAM and dedicate 50% to the mysql innodb buffer. This value won’t be changed in case the system RAM changes so it’s up to the administrator to adjust it. For test systems or low RAM systems, lowering this setting is one of the most effective ways of releasing RAM. The administrator can check the innodb buffer hit rate on production systems; a hit rate over 99% is desired to avoid bottlenecks. |
kamailio→lb→pkg_mem | 16 | This setting affects the amount of RAM the system will use. Each kamailio-lb worker will have this amount of RAM reserved. Lowering this setting up to 8 will help to release some memory depending on the number of kamailio-lb workers running. This can be a dangerous setting as the lb process could run out of memory. Use with caution. |
kamailio→lb→shm_mem | 1/16 * Total System RAM | The installer will set this value to 1/16 of the total system RAM. This setting does not change even if the system RAM does so it’s up to the administrator to tune it. It has been calculated that 1024 (1GB) is a good value for 50K subscriber environment. For a test environment, setting the value to 64 should be enough. "Out of memory" messages in the kamailio log can indicate that this value needs to be raised. |
kamailio→lb→tcp_children | 8 | Number of TCP workers kamailio-lb will spawn per listening socket. The value should be fine for a mixed UDP-TCP 50K subscriber system. Lowering this setting can free some RAM as the number of kamailio processess would decrease. For a test system or a pure UDP subscriber system 2 is a good value. 1 or 2 TCP workers are always needed. |
kamailio→lb→tls→enable | yes | Enable or not TLS signaling on the system. Setting this value to "no" will prevent kamailio to spawn TLS listening workers and free some RAM. |
kamailio→lb→udp_children | 8 | See kamailio→lb→tcp_children explanation |
kamailio→proxy→children | 8 | See kamailio→lb→tcp_children explanation. In this case the proxy only listens udp so these children should be enough to handle all the traffic. It could be set to 2 for test systems to lower the requirements. |
kamailio→proxy→*_expires | Set the default and the max and min registration interval. The lower it is more REGISTER requests will be handled by the lb and the proxy. It can impact in the network traffic, RAM and CPU usage. | |
kamailio→proxy→natping_interval | 30 | Interval for the proxy to send a NAT keepalive OPTIONS message to the nated subscriber. If decreased, this setting will increase the number of OPTIONS requests the proxy needs to send and can impact in the network traffic and the number of natping processes the system needs to run. See kamailio→proxy→natping_processes explanation. |
kamailio→proxy→natping_processes | 7 | Kamailio-proxy will spawn this number of processes to send keepalive OPTIONS to the nated subscribers. Each worker can handle about 250 messages/second (depends on the hardware). Depending the number of nated subscribers and the kamailio→proxy→natping_interval parameter the number of workers may need to be adjusted. The number can be calculated like nated_subscribers/natping_interval/pings_per_second_per_process. For the default options, asuming 50K nated subscribers in the system the parameter value would be 50.000/30/250 = (6,66) 7 workers. 7 is the maximum number of processes kamailio will accept. Raising this value will cause kamailio not to start. |
kamailio→proxy→shm_mem | 1/16 * Total System RAM | See kamailio→lb→shm_mem explanation. |
rateomat→enable | yes | Set this to no if the system shouldn’t perform rating on the CDRs. This will save CPU usage. |
rsyslog→external_log | 0 | If enabled, the system will send the log messages to an external server. Depending on the rsyslog→external_loglevel parameter this can increase dramatically the network traffic. |
rsyslog→ngcp_logs_preserve_days | 93 | This setting will set the number of days ngcp logs under /var/log/ngcp will be kept in disk. Lowering this setting will free a high amount of disk space. |
In case of using virtualized environment with limited amount of hardware resources, you can use the script ngcp-toggle-performance-config to adjust sip:provider PRO configuration for high/low performance: |
root@spce:~# /usr/sbin/ngcp-toggle-performance-config /usr/sbin/ngcp-toggle-performance-config - tool to adjust sip:provider configuration for low/high performance --help Display this usage information --high-performance Adjust configuration for system with normal/high performance --low-performance Adjust configuration for system with low performance (e.g. VMs) root@spce:~#
The sip:provider PRO platform provides detailed logging and log files for each component included in the system via rsyslog. The main folder for log files is /var/log/ngcp/, it contains a list of self explanatory log files named by component name.
The sip:provider PRO is a high performance system which requires compromise between traceability (maximum amount of debug information being written to hard drive) and productivity (minimum load on IO subsystem). This is the reason why different log levels are configured for the provided components by default.
Most log files are designed for debugging sip:provider PRO by Sipwise operational team while main log files for daily routine usage are:
Log file | Content | Estimated size |
---|---|---|
/var/log/ngcp/api.log | API logs providing type and content of API requests and responses as well as potential errors | medium |
/var/log/ngcp/panel.log | Admin Web UI logs when performing operational tasks on the ngcp-panel | medium |
/var/log/ngcp/cdr.log | mediation and rating logs, e.g. how many CDRs have been generated and potential errors in case of CDR generation or rating fails for particular accounting data | medium |
/var/log/ngcp/ha.log | fail-over related logs in case a node in a pair loses connection to the other side, when a standby node takes over or an active node goes standby due to intra-node communication issues or external ping node connection issues | small |
/var/log/ngcp/kamailio-lb.log | Overview of SIP requests and replies along with network source and destination information flowing through the platform | huge |
it is highly NOT recommended to change default log levels as it can cause system IO overloading which will affect call processing. |
the exact size of log files depend on system type, system load, system health status and system configuration, so cannot be estimated with high precision. Additionally operational network parameters like ASR and ALOC may impact the log files' size significantly. |