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.

Code for OpenSER 1.2.0 frozen

Starting with today the development for 1.2.0 is closed. No new features will be added until the release. The next month will be dedicated to testing, integration of submitted patches and fixing reported bugs.

We have a lot of new code to test, help in this respect is very much appreciated. To keep track of discovered issues, please register them on the tracker -- it this way you make sure it is not lost in mail threads:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=139143&atid=743020

OpenSER v1.1.1.Released

Version 1.1.1 of OpenSER has been released. It is an update of version 1.1.0 and includes the fixes for the issues discovered in version 1.1.0, therefore all people using 1.1.0 should upgrade to this new version.

For people using sms, permissions, postgres, unixodbc, osp, it is highly recommended to move to this release, in the case no CVS updates were done after v1.1.0 (if you installed and maintain OpenSER from CVS, then you have to use branch rel_1_1_0, as it was for v1.1.0). The compatibility of the configuration file and database has been preserved (you do not need to do database reinstallation).

Some details about v1.1.1 can be found here

Detailed changelog:
http://www.openser.org/pub/openser/1.1.1/ChangeLog

Sources can be downloaded from:
http://openser.org/pub/openser/1.1.1/

The documentation for modules is posted at:
http://openser.org/docs/modules/1.1.x/

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

Kamailio (OpenSER) - Summary of 2007

2007 was a year full of achievements and events for Kamailio (OpenSER). We had a major release in summer (1.1.0), and a continuous increase in features set and robustness. What was new in 1.1.0 was summarized in release news:
http://www.kamailio.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=68

Since then we went though many milestones. We had the first Kamailio (OpenSER) summit where we were able to meet many folks from the lists, have nice chats and present interesting VoIP solutions based on OpenSER.
http://www.kamailio.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=57&Itemid=71

A very important statistic is the number of new modules and features introduced in current development version after 1.1.0:
- domainpolicy - policies to connect federations
- imc - instant messaging conferencing
- mi_fifo and mi_xmlrpc - FIFO and XMLRPC transports for the new management interface (MI)
- perl - embed perl programming in configuration file
- presence - SIMPLE Presence Server implementation
- pua, pua_mi, pua_usrloc - presence user agent client implementations for user location records and management interface
- seas - connector to SIP Application Server - WeSIP - Java SIP Servlet Application Server (http://www.wesip.eu)
- snmpstats - SNMP (Simple Network Management Interface) interface to OpenSER statistics
- sst - SIP session timer support
- xmpp - transparent SIP-XMPP gateway

Documentation and news about all these:
http://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/1.2.x/
http://www.kamailio.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=2&Itemid=9

A lot of other significant improvements and addons were included in existing code (management interface, fetch database support, postgres, usrloc, dialog, enum, acc modules polishing), openser web administrator was developed. There is not very long time to the next release, along with few pending new features, the next period will be allocated to core components like timers, dns and configuration file flexibility. By end of January we should approach a new testing phase.

This year the OpenSER community collaboration exploded, dokuwiki has lot of content, many tutorials were submitted, new developers and many modules sponsored by companies, mailing lists and web forum are places to get reliable information about Kamailio (OpenSER)...

We want to thank to all of you (developers, contributors with patches, tools and documentation, testers and Kamailio (OpenSER) users) for supporting the project. 2006 was a very good year for Kamailio (OpenSER) and 2007 looks very challenging.

Kamailio (OpenSER) vs SER performances

Following lot of questions and comments related to the results published by Iptelorg guys related to openser vs ser performances on their site, I will give some clarifications.

First, the tests were done only by Iptelorg guys. They didn't ask anybody of openser development team if could help them to make accurate tests and make sure that openser and ser have same internal parameters. For people familiar with these SIP servers, it is well known that the applications uses internal hash tables, different number of processes, memory sizes, and so on -- this parameters can influence a lot if they have different values.

Because they continued saying tests are fair and reflect reality, we had to investigate and debug ser which ended in something pretty much expected -- they did performance improvement, but the processing was totally wrong - we reported the bug, and more or less it was admitted that it was the source of the performance improvement in ser stable version (although some from Iptelorg tried to say the results of the bug were not critical -- but was a bug). Follow the thread on mailing list for more details:

http://kamailio.org/pipermail/users/2006-November/007841.html

Removing that bug, ser gets back more or less to same performances.

Kamailio (OpenSER) will do performance measurements in the testing period for version 1.2.0. But it will be only for openser, as we won't try to claim we know ser that well to be sure that any eventual comparison is fair.

In open source it is expected to have friendly relationship with similar projects, not unsustainable accuses and unfair approaches and comments about the others.