OpenSER v1.2.1 released

New stable release of OpenSER was out on the 23rd of March as version 1.2.1. It is patch release of branch 1.2, emerging from the fixes done to the 1.2.0 release. All people using 1.2.0 release are encouraged to upgrade to 1.2.1 as it includes several important fixes.

The upgrade should be seamless, there is no updated to the database structure or to configuration file syntax. The fixes concern only the bugs and issues occurred in 1.2.0 release.

eLiberatica - Romanian Open Source Conference

I managed finally to attend eLiberatica, due to some traveling there were some doubts around, and I am glad I did it. So far, Romania was a country where the Open Source still was considered geeks world, not suitable for business. That's mainly because of poor implications of authorities and the usual aggressive attitude of the big players in IT on local market.

Personally I hope, with this event, more eyes turned to Open Source, opening the way of deeper analysis that will conduct to a better understanding of the concept and the maturity of such applications. I have attended many events where the audience was asked " Who is using Open Source?" gathering like 10-15% or hands up, while the question " Who is using Firefox/Mozilla?" got at least 40%.

Open Source VoIP is pretty well represented by Romanians, OpenSER and Yate being worldwide relevant applications in this field. My presentation was focused on the Romanian contribution to OpenSER so far, exposing as well a solution to implement a ITSP using only Open Source applications. This does not mean won't cost you anything, but is lot of money saving and flexibility there.

In the hope that recently constituted ROSDEV (Romanian Open Source Development) group and events like eLiberatica will increase the level of Romanian contributions to Open Source, I will like to give the appropriate credits to Lucian Saviuc who managed to organize a very successful first editions of eLiberatica, gathering well known representatives of important projects in Open Source: MySQL, eZ, PHP, Mozilla, Gnome, Apache.

The event was located in the beautiful city of Brasov, in the middle of Carpathian mountains, about 30km away of Dracula Castle, who, I'm sure :-), enjoyed the event and attendants.

Presentation is available here.

Kamailio (OpenSER) on the road, May-June 2007

There will be series of VoIP events in the near future where Kamailio (OpenSER) will attend, very good opportunities for folks around the project or interested in VoIP to meet.

Kamailio (OpenSER) was present so far in 2007 to FOSDEM, ROSDEV and VoN Spring. Next is eLiberatica, May 18-19, Brasov, Romania. From May 30 to June 2, OpenSER will participate with booth the LinuxTag Exhibition, Berlin, Germany. We move to Paris, for OpenSER Advanced Programming Course at INRIA, June 4-6 and continue to VoN Spring Europe, Stockholm, Sweden, June 11-14. End of June is USA, Chicago, at ClueCon.

Details are published to Kamailio (OpenSER )website.

OpenSER 1.3.0 campaign started

As Kamailio (OpenSER) community got used, after about one month since a major release, the campaign for the next major release begins. For the roadmap, an initial IRC meeting happened on the 20th April (see summary and roadmap draft).

However, meanwhile quite a lot of brand new code was pushed on public SVN. SIMPLE-XMPP Presence gateway came to light via pua_xmpp module, to complete the IM gateway. Another interesting addition in Presence side is the Shared Line Appearance (SLA/BLA), very useful when trying to accomplish a signaling PBX (pua_bla).

Furthermore, perlvdb (perl virtual database) module allows any kind of data source mapped over DB API, opening new possibilities, like LDAP authorization and authentication. The list ends now with cfgutils, a new module to gather interesting utilities for configuration file (e.g., random value, sleep).

Besides that, tracker has several other modules submitted by third party contributors, waiting the review before the admission to SVN: auth_identity - SIP identity authentication; auth_avp - AVP-based authentication; auth_ldap - LDAP-based authentication; benchmark - small module to perform benchmarking from configuration file

Advanced Kamailio (OpenSER) Programming Course

First Advanced OpenSER Programming Course will take place in Paris, hosted by INRIA, June 4-6, 2007

Following some discussions started during first Kamailio (OpenSER) Summit, we are happy to announce that first Advanced Programming Course will happen very soon. Courtesy of INRIA (many thanks to Philippe Sultan) we have the room and a good connected location. There will be three full days of deep analysis and survey of internal architecture and structures, best practices to add new features, optimizations and OpenSER's specific components (memory manager, locking system, ...).

The course is dedicated to people willing to develop Kamailio (OpenSER) extensions. It will be a class of 14 persons. The participation fee will be just to cover the logistic required for this event, estimated to be about 150-200Euro per person, for the full course (mainly is subject of how many participants will be registered).

More details at:
http://www.kamailio.org/mos/view/News/NewsItem/Advanced-OpenSER-Programming-Course/

OpenSER 1.2.0 - Perfomance Tests

We took the time to do some performance tests for two of the most important components of OpenSER 1.2.0: transaction module (tm module) and user location (registrar and usrloc modules).

The results show the capacity that can be handled by the two components, which should move the concern that they are bottle neck in a VoIP system. The numbers are higher than what one would want to deploy in real life within only one physic VoIP server.

TM got performance of processing over 28 millions complete calls per hour while user location can handle registration coming from over 4 millions phones with an average of 10min for expiration time. Testing server was an ordinary desktop, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6300 @ 1.86GHz, 1GB of memory, 100Mbs Ethernet card.

News is here:

http://www.openser.org/mos/view/News/NewsItem/OpenSER-1.2.0---Perfomance-Tests/

OpenSER v1.2.0 Released

News from:
http://www.openser.org/mos/view/News/NewsItem/OpenSER-v1.2.0-Released/

After about 8 months since the last major release, with about 6.5 months of development and 1.5 of extensive testing, OpenSER version 1.2.0 is out. This version brings a lot of new features and improvements to existing code. Can be defined as the biggest improvement between releases so far. Configuration script has new directives while some of the old one were removed or replaced with a new form.

Dokuwiki page has been created to track these changes and to ease the migration:

http://openser.org/dokuwiki/doku.php/install:1.1.x-to-1.2.x

The range of use cases was largely increased, important achievements toward SIP Application Server were added by seas and perl modules, which allow writing Java SIP Servlet extensions and Perl Applications for OpenSER. Meanwhile, the old core components were substantially improved, using OpenSER as SIP proxy, registrar or simple router for load balancing or least cost routing being more flexible and faster.

We would like to thank for the work, suggestions and contributions to this release to all people supporting the project.

See full notes about OpenSER 1.2.0 release:

http://www.openser.org/mos/view/OpenSER-v1.2.x-Release-Notes/

On the way to OpenSER 1.2.0

While testing the upcoming OpenSER 1.2.0, many news surrounded the project.

CISCO is using OpenSER as SIP proxy of Cisco Service Node for Linksys One:
http://www.openser.org/mos/view/News/NewsItem/OpenSER-gets-CISCOs-vote-of-confidence/

OpenSER Configuration Generator, a wizard-like web tool to build config files for OpenSER, was launched:
http://www.openser.org/mos/view/News/NewsItem/OpenSER-Configuration-Generator/

The SIMPLE-XMPP gateway in OpenSER was presented at FOSDEM 2007, Brussels, Belgium:
http://www.openser.org/mos/view/News/NewsItem/FOSDEM-2007---Remarks/

The release 1.2.0 is schedule for March 12, 2007. It brings a handful of new feature -- listing some of them:
- SIMPLE Presence support (http://openser.org/dokuwiki/doku.php/presence:presence-module)
- SNMP (http://openser.org/docs/modules/devel/snmpstats.html)
- PERL API (http://openser.org/docs/modules/devel/perl.html)
- JAVA SIP Servlet Application Server (http://wesip.eu)
- script variables and transformations (http://openser.org/dokuwiki/doku.php/transformations:devel)
- DNS failover
- IP blacklists
- XMPP IM gateway
- XMLRPC
- SIP session timers
- secure federation peering
- retransmission timer accuracy
- automatic error handling
- AVPs in reply routes

Stay tunned.