berofos telephony failover switch

Software failover has a limit, and the limit is the wire. If a PBX has locked up rather than crashed, it will happily hold the ISDN line and answer nothing. If a maintenance window means unplugging the primary system, someone has to be on site with a screwdriver. The berofos exists for exactly the cases where the fix is physical: it moves the lines.

Two scenarios cover almost everything. In the failover scenario two PBXs sit side by side and only one of them is connected to the lines. A watchdog polls the active system; when the answers stop, the switch hands the lines to the standby system. In the bypass scenario a new PBX sits in front of an old one — an Asterisk in front of a legacy system, for instance — and if the new one fails, the lines are handed straight back to the old system that is still cabled and still works.

The device is technology-independent because it does not speak any protocol. It switches all eight pins of four times four RJ45 ports, so the same box handles four BRI, four PRI, four FXO or four FXS. Two switchable mains outlets on the back allow a hung device to be power-cycled from the same web interface, which is often the fastest remote repair there is.

Triggering is not limited to the watchdog. The web interface switches manually, the API lets a monitoring system switch on its own criteria, and syslog plus e-mail notification make sure the event is visible rather than silent.