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How to connect an external drive (NAS or Storage Server) in VitalPBX to store the recordings?

There are several ways to add more disk capacity to our VitalPBX server, next we will show how to create and connect a remote storage unit.

Scenery

We have two servers:

  1. VitalPBX Server

  2. Storage Server

Server installation

Let’s assume that our Storage Server also has Debian 11

Next, we are going to prepare our storage server, for which we install the following software.

apt install nfs-kernel-server

We create a folder, which we are going to share with the VitalPBX Server

mkdir -p /nfs/recondings

If we want all clients to have access to the directory, the permission restrictions must be removed:

chown nobody:nogroup /nfs/recordings/
chmod 777 /nfs/recordings/

Now it is necessary to grant access permissions to the machine that serves as the server, for this we must modify the /etc/exports file

nano /etc/exports

At the end of the file we will add the access instruction for a client:

/nfs/recordings        VPBX_IP(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

Apply the changes and restart the service:

exportfs -a
systemctl restart nfs-kernel-server

In the event that the server’s firewall is configured, it will be necessary to allow access to the clients:

ufw allow from  VPBX_IP to any port nfs

Client Installation

On the client (VitalPBX Server) we will install nfs-common:

apt install nfs-common

Create the directory where the server shared folder will be mounted:

mkdir –p /nfs/recordings/

Later we move all the contents of the folder /var/spool/asterisk/monitor to /nfs/recordings/

mv /var/spool/asterisk/monitor/ /nfs/recordings/

Since we no longer have the monitor folder where VitalPBX saved the recordings, we proceed to create a virtual link.

cd /var/spool/asterisk/
ln -s /nfs/recordings/ monitor

Now we change the permissions so that Asterisk is happy.

chown -R asterisk:asterisk monitor

Next we are going to mount the shared directory:

mount STORAGE_IP:/nfs/recordings /nfs/recordings

Permanently mount the shared directory:

nano /etc/fstab
STORAGE_IP:/nfs/recordings       /nfs/recordings      nfs auto,nofail,noatime,nolock,intr,tcp,actimeo=1800 0 0