OpenSER Admin Course at VoN Boston 2007

Last minute arrangements allowed to host one day of OpenSER Admin Training session within VoN Fall Boston, Nov 1, 2007. Despite of late notice, I hope that those interested in the topic can make it to the event. The course is covering hot topics as scalability, HA and security.

For more details about the course and registration, see:

http://www.openser.org/mos/view/OpenSER-Admin-Course---Boston-2007/

Berkely DB Support

Courtesy of William Quan, of CISCO Systems, a new DB module has been submitted to the trunk that incorporates the Berkeley DB into Kamailio (OpenSER). This module depends on Berkeley DB, which is a high-performance embedded DB kernel.

The Berkeley DB offers a couple of architectures:
1. Concurrent Data Store (CDS)
2. Transaction Data Store

This module uses the CDS model. One of the main differences between these architectures is DB recovery and robustness (Please refer to the Berkeley DB for full details). In a nutshell, the onus of recovery is on the application (e.g. openser). This modules contains a recovery program utils/db_berkeley/bdb_recover that can be used to recover DB files.

Like other DB modules, the DB must be created before Kamailio (OpenSER) can be started. The standard openserdbctl script can be used to create the DB once the Berkeley DB is installed.


See the readme file for db_berkely module and the news at kamailio (openser) site.

Freezing in one week for 1.3 release

Time to prepare a new major release for OpenSER is approaching. In about one week the code will be frozen, as we plan to have next major release 1.3 out in November-December time frame.

It is the time to do the commits of the features you want in 1.3. To list what other important changes happened in this respect within last weeks:
- refurbishment of the pseudo-variables allowing to access AVPs and headers with a dynamic index
- "while" statement allowing to iterate through the AVPs/headers
- usage of special processes in nathelper to send keepalive NAT pings, improving a lot the scalability

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 :-) .