[VOIPSA Best Practices] Best Practices document structure set -next question: are these the appropriate areas?

[Dustin D. Trammell]

On Fri, 2007-01-19 at 14:17 -0500, dan_york at Mitel.com wrote:
> - I don't know where fail-over fits. Section 8, in *my* mind (but I'm
> just one contributor) was about all the physical layer stuff that many
> of us network geeks generally try to ignore such as backup power,
> physical security, etc.  I was thinking of it from the "availability"
> point-of-view in that if you lose power and don't have your IP-PBX
> *and* network switches powered by a UPS, your phones are nice pretty
> bricks.  And you should have them in locked rooms, etc.  I don't know
> that we'll have all that many Best Practices in this area. 
> 
> As to fail-over, I'm not sure... is it in Section 8?  Or is it in call
> control?  I'm not sure on that one... any other opinions? 

We may want to address this, but I would suggest only addressing the
aspect of availability as it relates to fail-over due to security issues
rather than operational issues.  What I mean is, what is the best
practice for dealing with a device that is disabled due to being flooded
offline and may recover after the flood subsides?  What is the best
practice for dealing with a specific component or application within a
device that fails due to an attack without the entire device failing?
Those issues we may well want to address.  What happens with fail-over
if a device looses power, has a hardware failure, overheats, or
otherwise dies entirely?  That seems more appropriately addressed by
network operations best practice or your VoIP systems architect.

Making this distinction is similar to your distinction between QoS
issues due to security and QoS issues due to network/operations issues.
Further breaking this out into appropriate sections for what exactly is
failing over would probably also help limit the scope.

-- 
Dustin D. Trammell
VoIP Security Research
TippingPoint, a division of 3Com
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