Figure 1
The nodes ana3 and ana62 will host a mated pair of redundant ss7box acting as a single point code. ana3 will host Asterisk, SMG, ISUP, SCCP, and a CNAM application that is capable of being both a client and a server. ana19 will be a clustered ISUP node using SS7 services from ana3 and ana62 with a new twist - it will have a point code that differs from the redundant ss7box pair. It will also host Asterisk and SMG. ana17 will be a single node instance of asterisk/SMG/ss7box. The dt node will be dedicated to SCCP and related applications with CNAM client/server being the lead-off application. This node will also serve as a developer workstation and regression test platform to support integration of a fiber interface into ss7box. In the middle, nodes ana60 and ana61 provide MTP3 transfer services like those found in STPs.
The lab configuration creates quite a few functional interactions and raises the overall lab complexity so that we can get more test coverage and carry out development in several areas simultaneously. Changing the lab is labor intensive and work in other areas stops as a result, so it's not done as often as needed. In this case, we could no longer put off the pain of changing the lab because progress had come to a halt.
The ana3, ana62, ana60, ana61, and ana17 nodes had been working together prior to the change. The dt node has been under construction for a while. It took a while to find the right version of opensuse (10.2) to work with the fiber interface libraries. Then it took more time to figure out that its A102c interfaces are incompatible with the modern SMG/ss7box so an upgrade to A102SH was required. The SS7 linkset between dt and ana60 was put into service today. What remains is to put the dt-ana61 linkset into service, create ana19, and reconfigure ana62 into an SMG/ss7box node from its current status as an SMG-only clustered node.
