OpenSER Admin Course and VoN Rome 2007

I hope it is general opinion that the OpenSER admin course at VoN Rome was successful. The room was full, about 35 attendees. Time was pretty short to get deeper in OpenSER configuration tricks, but should give the base of knowledge to build proper and well-designed VoIP platforms using OpenSER.

It started with introduction of configuration file architecture, going through common components of it, touching the very important aspects of a VoIP environment: NAT traversal, accounting, authentication and authorization, load balancing and high availability. The last topic of the tutorial was integration with Asterisk media server, towards a lot of good steps were done in the past for a straightforward solution.

The day ended with an open discussion, revealing hot questions about DNS balancing and black-listing, NAT traversal, present and future of the project.

VoN Rome itself was pretty well represented by the local market, with nice SIP-enabled video solutions for security and surveillance at Video on the Net section. Otherwise, usual debates SIP-P2PSIP-IMS, etc. Personally I have met for the first time a lot of people using OpenSER, also meeting old friends (e.g., Andreas of sipwise.com, Georgios, Federico, Adrian, ...) from the past events. Photo available at: flickr.com.

New enhacements during end of August - beginning of September

H350 is a new module that follows ITU H350 recommendation, contribution by University of North Carolina (module's readme). From 1&1 Germany came the carrierroute module, targeting large scale deployments, allowing all in one routing, balancing and blacklisting capabilities, from a config file or a database source (module's readme).

Still in scalability area, OpenSER allows to start timer processes on demand, improvement that will open the door to better performances in handling nat traversal at signaling layer, with a single OpenSER box.

Not the least, the launch of OpenXCAP contributes to complete the components required to implement a full SIP-based presence service.

OpenSER v1.2.2 Released

This is a minor release in the branch of 1.2 release series, containing only fixes to bugs found since the previous release 1.2.1.

See all changes at:
http://www.openser.org/pub/openser/1.2.2/ChangeLog

The configuration script used with any 1.2.x version is compatible. There was a change in the structure of table "active_watchers" for handling local and remote CSeq numbers -- you have to recreate this table if you are using presence module (instructions are provided here:
http://openser.org/dokuwiki/doku.php/install:1.2.1-to-1.2.2).

Source tarball can be downloaded from:
http://www.openser.org/pub/openser/latest/src/

Or from sourceforge download page:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=139143

Download page providing several options is available at:
http://www.openser.org/mos/view/Download/

The documentation for modules is posted at:
http://openser.org/docs/modules/1.2.x/

Main documentation page is available at:
http://www.openser.org/mos/view/OpenSER-Documentation-Repository/

If someone wants to contribute with packages for different distros, please send the link from where can be downloaded to team@openser.org.

We would like to thank to all developers and contributors for their work with coding and testing for this new release.

SCTP and Config Benchmarking

Two of the newest additions in OpenSER development version got the attention in the last time.

First is about SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol), a contribution of Connecticut College, completes the list with transport protocols supported by OpenSER. SCTP is mainly used for trunking, hopefully will gain more space in end-user side as well.

http://www.openser.org/mos/view/News/NewsItem/SCTP-Support/

Second is about benchmarking your configuration file. The new module benchmark brings the necessary tools so you can wrap a piece of configuration file and get the execution time. Elements that can have decisional impact in scalability and tunning.

http://www.openser.org/mos/view/News/NewsItem/Benchmarking-OpenSER-config/

OpenSER Admin Course - Rome 2007

During the VoN Autumn 2007, in Rome, Italy, will be one full day of OpenSER Admin Training sessions, on the 26th of September. The target are the VoIP administrators that are managing OpenSER-based platforms. The price is 315Euro till August 31 and 360Euro afterwards. Within this price, the participants will get access to other technical and social events of VoN, also some meals on the course day.

The teachers are two of the co-founders of OpenSER project, Daniel-Constantin Mierla (myself) and Bogdan-Andrei Iancu.

The content of the course try to cover most of the delicate aspects of configuring and managing OpenSER, such as accounting, security, high availability, as well as integration with media server Asterisk.

More details you will find on the OpenSER project web site:
http://www.openser.org/mos/view/OpenSER-Admin-Course---Rome-2007/

Details are available on VoN Europe web site:
http://www.von.com/2007/rome/web/index.php
http://www.von.com/2007/rome/web/confSchedule.php#os
http://www.von.com/2007/rome/web/attendRegister.php

Worth to mention that Rome is an amazing city, VoN is a reference event for VoIP and OpenSER a great application :-) .

Bunch of new features in devel version

The development version (to be released as 1.3.0) has introduced recently a bunch of new features. Among them is long waiting LDAP connector support (ldap module). The module allows to execute search queries against LDAP servers and fetch results in AVPs. It has support for LDAP server failover, can work with many LDAP servers simultaneously.

The auth module added support to do authentication taking the username and password from pseudo-variables (which include AVPs). Combining this with ldap module, one can easily implement authentication against LDAP servers via configuration file.

Several enhancements were included in the dialog module, making the internal structure persistent over OpenSER restart using database. Now completed dialog details (From/To headers, Contact, Record Routes, ...) are stored.

The mi_datagram module came to replace the old unixsock server (btw, this has been removed already). It is a new transport for the management interface (MI), completing the FIFO and XMLRPC. It can deal with both unix socket files and inet datagram sockets.

Truphone Granted an Injunction Against T-Mobile

Interesting news from yesterday that really worth mentioning, read more on voipuser.org.

Truphone is a Mobile VoIP operator based in UK offering cheap rates on mobile calls. They use OpenSER as core SIP router in their VoIP platform.

ClueCon 2007 Remarks

ClueCon'07 was a remarkable VoIP developer event, one of the best I attended so far. The commercial aspect was low profile, a lot of speeches focusing on the technical aspects. Very interesting were the group meetings of developers, discussing interoperability issues and collaboration mechanisms.

My speech was a general presentation of OpenSER, going to tech stuff as well. Because of many requests, I gave the second presentation Thursday morning, showing real configuration examples of OpenSER, from the simplest one, to more advanced, exemplifying with voipuser.org config. I went through load balancer, presence server, registrar or redirect servers, Perl application example.

Among interesting things there: nice demos from Truphone, FreeSWITCH updates, Ruby library for Asterisk AGI (simple way to create advanced dialing plan), voice transformation and liar detection :-) , Jingle discussion panel.

The slides from my first presentation are at:
http://www.openser.org/events/2007-ClueCon/openser_daniel-constantin.mierla.pdf