Packages for Kamailio v3.3.0

Debian/Ubuntu packages are ready in the usual APT repository, including nightly builds of the GIT branch 3.3, details at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/wiki/packages/debs

RPMs for CentOS/RedHat, Fedora, openSuse (various versions for each OS) are now available on openSuse build factory repository, details at:

•   http://www.kamailio.org/wiki/packages/rpms

There you find the note about Peter Dunkley’s repository, which has also builds for Raspberry Pi.

Save the bits! Act now!

It's about the time to announce publicly one of the most important world wide initiatives - "SAVE THE BITS!" Foundation.

If you are not familiar with the concept, the BIT is the smallest entity of computers and Internet data ecosystem, wikipedia is a good place to read about it.

There are many species of bits out there, probably over-exceeding the animal and plant species on the earth. The bits are growing in colonies, by grouping themselves they become live entities, for example being able to move, execute tasks, perform math operations faster than humans - one can clearly hear or even see different kinds of such colonies.

The first focus of our foundation is to take care of real time communication bits, especially those related to rich communication services (RCS - e.g., VoIP or Internet-based telephony, instant messaging, tweeting, a.s.o.). It's not about an endangered category of bit species in terms of high risk of extinction, but about the maltreatment they have to suffer.

IP based real time communication involves migrations of a lot of bits from one device to another one. This process can be very stressful for the tiny, the little cuties bits.

Just think about what kind of abusive, degrading and mercy-less situations the bits have to tolerate, such as:

• did you know that each bit is electrocuted? And not only once, but by each device it is passing through, like computers, routers, switches, servers, iphones, ipads, etc. During RCS sessions each bit can get thousand of electricity shocks. Imagine that for you and think how you would tolerate that. Stop using RCS, save the bits from paintful treatments!
• you are in Miami on the beach and start calling your friend in Alaska? Have you thought about thermal shocks? You are sending bits from a very hot temperature to freezing in miliseconds. Did you wear them with proper clothes? Do you like to be parachuted naked in Alaska during Christmas?
• how many times you've got a call before waking up? Did you brush your teeth before answering? Your mouth flow slaps the bits straight in the face. Eating and drinking crap, smoking & co flood the bits with terrible smell
• have you heard anyone yelling at the phone? Dirty words, swearing! It's the feeble bits that have to endure all of that
• do you know that many RCS bits are dying at premature age? Many devices destroy them in short after receiving. Fortunately governments started to act and require long term protection for them, forcing communication companies to keep RCS bits on high quality comfort storage systems (like 5 stars hotels for people), where state agencies (and 'good-will' hackers) can keep an eye on them whenever they wish

It is not honorable for our civilization to allow such maltreatment and humiliations to any of exiting beings on out planet, the colonies of bits, especially the ones in RCS are alive, they move, you can hear them, you can see them -- they are all your voice and video session.

Even it was an initiative that acted pretty discreet so far, we've got lot of support. Recently large mobile operators publicly announced new policies to protect the innocent RCS bits on their infrastructure (e.g., operators from Sweden, Spain, Germany, just to name very few),  by completely blocking usage of VoIP or overcharging for it. In several locations, where this unacceptable situation was truly understood, using bits for VoIP and RCS has been made a crime by legislation, like facing up to 15 years in prison for infringement. Even many vendors take our side by deploying ALG guardians in their home-routers to stop VoIP from working.

Moreover, each human must be aware and join the movement. Don't tolerate abuses again the bits! Use analog telephony and operator's voice plans, by that bits are happy, operators are happy, you are going to be [poor, but] happy! Yeah, everyone happy!

It is not an easy fight, we could call it war, a tough one, but there is visible progress. The foundation urges all mobile and fixed operators to act and start protecting RCS bits, NOW! Block VoIP, block RCS!

To join the foundation or donate for the cause, contact the author of this blog! Remember, each bit matters!

And don't forget to spread the word to the world! Leave a comment and tell us how you protect the bits! Tell us what torturres against bits you witnessed so far!

Facebook fan page, website and other online resources will be launched soon!


Full disclaimer - I do work in RCS business, one of my main activities being the development of an open source SIP server application (Kamailio), used to provide rich communication services. In more than 10 years of activity in this sector, I came to deep understanding of this abusing issue against innocent bits, fighting from inside and offering delicate care to the bits passing through Kamailio, for example:

• all received bits are stored in clean buffers
• we have our own friendly manager to care of the bits in memory storage
• we don't allow unaccredited persons to send us bits, authenticating and carefully checking each packet we receive
• we don't send the bits to untrusted party, in this way being sure the bits are well cared at destination
• we add extra protection layer (based on strong TLS security) whenever we have to send the signaling bits through unknown paths

Kamailio v3.3.0 Released

Kamailio SIP Server v3.3.0 is out – a new major release with a very large number of new features and improvements.
 
On June 18, 2012, Kamailio (OpenSER) 3.3.0 has been released – this release is a result of about 6 months of development and 2 months of testing from the teams of Kamailio (OpenSER) and SIP Express Router (SER) projects.

 

This version comes with 7 brand new modules in addition to a lot of fresh features in core and old modules. Continue reading full release notes at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v3-3-0-release-notes/

Enjoy SIP routing in a secure, flexible and easier way with Kamailio v3.3.0!

Asipto has recently announced two new training and consultancy public events where you can learn how to use Kamailio to build your rich communication services, read more about them at:

• Kamailio Advanced Training, in Seattle, WA, USA, September 24-26, 2012
• Kamailio Practical Workshop, in Alkmaar, Netherlads, September 10-12, 2012

New Kamailio Developer – Vicente Hernando

Kamailio SIP Server project announced Vicente Hernando as a new registered developer – he submitted lately very useful patches to ndb_redis module (e.g., array support in replies, redis free function for config), new ones being on the pipe — watch our mailing list where he is going present better his plans or see his contributed commits.

Mainly he will be in charge with ndb_redis module, being a heavy user of it, but there have been submissions from him to other parts of code, we welcome improvements and new good features anywhere!

Welcome and everyone is looking forward to his contributions!

Updates of Kamailio Debian Packages

Courtesy of Jon Bonilla, Debian packaging got a bit of updates in preparation to release Kamailio v3.3.0.

Next is his announcement on the Kamailio's users mailing list.

With the upcoming release of version 3.3.0, we have updated our Kamailio Debian repositories.

• Debian 5.0 “lenny” will no longer be supported. This means that no more nightly builds for this distribution will be triggered. We’ll provide builds for stable releases of 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 branches though.
• Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise” is now supported for nightly builds and 3.2+ versions. Next time a 3.2.x version is tagged we’ll provide the build. Meanwhile you can download the nightly build of 3.2 branch for this distro.
• There will be no more nightly builds of 3.1 branch. We’ll provide stable builds in case another version is released though.
• We now support nightly builds of branch 3.3 (same as 3.2 and master). You can test latest git versions of branch 3.3 until a stable release is built using these repositories:

deb http://deb.kamailio.org/kamailio33-nightly squeeze main
deb http://deb.kamailio.org/kamailio33-nightly wheezy main
deb http://deb.kamailio.org/kamailio33-nightly lucid main
deb http://deb.kamailio.org/kamailio33-nightly precise main

All the information and repositories can be found in Kamailio wiki as usual:

• http://www.kamailio.org/wiki/packages/debs

Kamailio Packages for Raspberry Pi

Peter Dunkley, a registered Kamailio developer, has built some RPMs of upcoming Kamailio 3.3.0, including for the Raspberry Pi (running Fedora 17).

If anyone wants to try them, they are available via Yum repository:

• http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9300853/yum/index.html

The post at Peter Dunkley’s blog:

• http://www.dunkley.me.uk/2012/06/kamailio-for-raspberry-pi.html

Remarks about Kamailio at LinuxTag

The participation of Kamailio at LinuxTag this year was filled with several related events and, as usually, a great opportunity for community meeting and social networking.

Again, five of the management team members were at the booth in various occasions, answering questions and making demos: Andreas, Carsten, Daniel, Henning and Ramona. Marius and Mario from 1 & 1 Romanian branch and Germany completed our staff. We shared the space with related SEMS project, Stefan, Rafael, Vladimir and Alena being there for it.

On Wednesday, Carsten had his presentation in the LinuxTag Conference track, Daniel did the Project Fast Forward presentation at Open Source Arena. On Thursday, Daniel gave one hour workshop about how to install Kamailio and configure it for secure unified communication services – a well received event, the seminar room being fully attended. On Saturday, the Project Fast Forward presentation was repeated by Daniel. Links to presentations:

• Kamailio Project Fast Track Presentation
• Kamailio Workshop – Secure UC Services
• Carsten’s presentation on Kamailio, IMS and Rich Communications

Most of visitors were from Germany, but we had several people coming from neighborhood countries, like Poland and Denmark.

We learned about interesting deployments using Kamailio, notable being a relatively large Instant Messaging and Presence communication platform, using the SIP SIMPLE presence modules (including RLS) – the average online user base being 40 000, with peaks at 60 000. Out there are much more larger Kamailio deployments, but mainly targeting telephony services. This deployment proves that SIP SIMPLE presence extensions are becoming more and more an attraction, not being a dead direction. Our upcoming Kamailio v3.3.0 has a lot of improvements in scalability of presence related modules, which along embedded XCAP server and MSRP relay modules, makes Kamailio the most complete SIP SIMPLE implementation out there.

Now LinuxTag 2012 is gone, time to focus on the release of Kamailio v3.3.0!

Planning for Kamailio v3.3.0 Release

The volume of reported issues on mailing lists and tracker has been close to zero lately, suggesting that upcoming Kamailio v3.3.0 is going well. Therefore it’s time to set the timelines for the new major release – by now there is more than one month since the development was frozen and testing phase started.

In my side, I (Daniel-Constantin Mierla) have 3.3.0 running in a production-like environment for about 4 weeks without problems and another one in a pre-production phase.

Having in consideration all these, the proposed date to branch 3.3 is set to June 11, 2012. If everything looks very good at that time (or actually few days before), we may do the release also by that date or next day. If not, it can be done a week later.

Branching will allow new features development on git master, there are already several contributed patches with new features flowing around on mailing lists and tracker.

Therefore, if you are aware of any issue, please report asap on mailing list (sr-dev [at] lists.sip-router.org) or tracker (preferable – http://sip-router.org/tracker/).

Other suggestions about planning the release 3.3.0 are welcome, as well.

If you want to check the draft of new features in v3.3.0, see:

• http://www.kamailio.org/wiki/features/new-in-devel

Testing and feedback is very appreciated!