Voicemail Pro Automatic Service Restart

Today someone asked me if Voicemail Pro on Linux would attempt an automatic restart if the service failed, as it would in Windows. Unfortunately the answer is a resounding NO!

I've been using Linux for years and I didn't see any technical reason why this couldn't be done. I decided to do some digging, and I believe that by making the changes I outline below to the Voicemail Pro service you should be able to have it automatically restart in the event of an abnormal termination. 

DISLCLAIMER: I have not tested this in a production environment. This is not supported by Avaya. If you need this functionality you can implement this fix at your own risk. I suggest opening a GRIP Request with Avaya to have them add this functionality to a new release! 

First, you will need to log in to the Application Server as the root user. Once logged in the next step is to edit the Voicemail Pro service. Enter the following command:

nano /etc/systemd/system/vmpro.service

This will launch the GNU nano editor, allowing you to modify the service directly. The image shown here is the configuration before any changes are made.

Use the arrow keys to navigate to the Service section. In order to tell the service to automatically restart we need to add the following lines:

Restart=on-failure

RestartSec=30s

StartLimitIntervalSec=200

StartLimitBurst=5

This tells the service to restart on failure after waiting 30 seconds, to a maximum of five times. 

Once the changes have been made, use <CTRL>+O to write the file, then <CTRL>+X to exit nano.Once back at the command prompt the system needs to know that you've made changes. Enter the following command:

systemctl daemon-reload

Once this is done the Voicemail Pro service may need to be restarted (again, this is untested), so go ahead and restart the service. 

These instructions should work on any Linux-based IP Office release to date, however future releases may include an updated version of systemd, the process that controls Linux services. If Avaya includes a newer version of systemd these instructions will need to be modified. 

If you do try to implement this, please let me know how well it worked in the comments.