Most of the articles I write on the Daily Asterisk News are about releases of software etc, but I thought I would give you an update on what I am working on day to day.

So, today I got up, checked my email, checked the munin graphs and noticed a problem with one of my web servers.

Looked like it was using so much CPU that I couldn't SSH in.

So, that's the first task of the day, see what's up there. Easiest was to get the machine restarted first up. So, I called Stewart from wic and asked him to reboot the server.

When it came back up I went over the logs and noticed a coupe of crashes in scripts I'm no longer using. So, crontab -e and disabled them.

Next up, I had an email from a customer in Spain who is using our telephone exchanges. He'd had Asterisk stop responding and had to restart it.

I logged in, no core dumps or anything, so I updated Asterisk to the latest version before delving too much deeper. If the problem happens again, I'll have to strip back the machine (remove Asterisk patches for post dial delay and userfield2-5) and recompile.

It's strange because we're running the same version of Asterisk here without any issues on all of our exchanges.

Next, a couple of queries about SmoothTorque and then back to clearing out emails. Nearly done on those now - the weekend should provide enough silence to get through a bunch :)

Anyway, so before I went to sleep (about 1am) last night I was working on some other stuff for our telephone exchanges. The customer in Spain is wanting to have groups for their customers so that they can do certain processes to a bunch of customers at a time.

So, I added an extra field to the bill_detail table to specify the group, and created a group table. I then created pages for adding/editing/deleting groups.

Next step was to create a page which would allow them to specify dates for invoices and have the group's invoices sent to an email address - not too hard as I already had grouping by postpaid/prepaid.

Compiled the code for Zend and shipped it.

The other day I had a call from a SmoothTorque customer in the UK saying that they upgraded their machines to Windows 7 and could no longer upload phone number lists - tested with Firefox, IE, Chrome - all the same. Weird. Ok, whatever, I'll try it out for myself. So, I get hold of a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, load it up into VirtualBox on my Mac, and try the upload with one of my servers.

Hmmm, works. Ok, so I try an upload to one of their servers. Works too. Hmmm, stranger. So, I get hold of the exact file they're trying to upload and it works for me.

Ok, so something very strange is going on here - I go through a million tests of different things and still can't get mine to fail or theirs to work.

So, I figure let's drop the existing upload code and replace it with something else. I've been using the uploadify code for some other projects so I decide to integrate this into SmoothTorque and make it an option.

I finish the code, test it (working) and give them the details of how to pull the update.

They then try to upload a file and get a new error.

Ok, strange, so I log in to their machine and do a 'watch "ls -alh /tmp"' command (watch is cool - it runs a command every two seconds and updates the results). This is interesting. They are uploading a 5MB file, and it starts ok, but once it passes 2MB the file disappears - even though the flash upload control says it's still being uploaded.

Well, what would do that? Maybe php.ini max file upload size? I check it and sure enough it's set to 2megs. Ok, so I change it to 20 megs and get them to try again. Hooray it works!

Ok, so step back from it for a second, maybe that was what was causing the other upload code to fail. So, I get them to revert the change of upload control and test it again. It still fails! Oh well, the new code will fix their problem but I never did get to the bottom of why their upload was failing!

Anyway, post a comment or vote this high and I'll post more regular updates of what I'm up to - or don't and I'll just keep doing what I've been doing :D