Kamailio World 2015 – The Schedule

It is one month till the start of Kamailio World 2015, time has passed very fast since we announced the event, accelerated by April filled with many public holidays.

The first draft of the schedule is now available, as usual, expect many speakers to tune the content of their presentation along the way to the day of the talk, to surprise the audience with challenging concepts and visions.

At this edition we were pleasely surprised by the number of submissions, but it was an extremely hard task to select the sessions. To accommodate as much as possible, we are introducing the lightning talks, two of 10 minutes each, to give the opportunity to present shortly about interesting ideas or updates of applications used in Kamailio and VoIP eco-system.

The two days of conference are filled with 28 sessions, the event being completed with 5 technical workshopsduring the pre-conference day. Several exhibitors will be available during the conference days with showcases of their products or solutions, ready with many demos on site.

We are very grateful to our sponsors, which made possible to bring again a consistent number of speakers, ensuring first class quality content for the entire event.

In about 4 weeks, we will be ready to welcome you in the beautiful city center of Berlin. Don’t miss the opportunity to attend this event, it is unique across Europe, bringing open source and real time communications industry together, bridging flexibility innovation with telecommunication businesses. It is now the right time to register!

See you in Berlin at the end of May!

Kamailio v4.3 – Development Frozen

The development (aka master) branch of Kamailio now enter the pre-release phase for version 4.3.0. No new features are allowed to be pushed to GIT master branch until we create a dedicated branch for 4.3 (expected to be in about 4 weeks or so).

The focus moves now on testing the code, to get it in a stable, rock solid state at the time of release. We hope to get many people from the community involved in testing. If you want to get involved and need assistance about what and how to do it, please don’t hesitate to write to mailing lists. The first step is to get Kamailio installed from sources, details at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/wiki/install/devel/git

Stay tuned for updates to the wiki pages with guidelines for migration from 4.2 to 4.3 as well as what is new in version 4.3.

The release of v4.3.0 is expected to be out few weeks after Kamailio World Conference — more or less about mid of June 2015.

Kamailio World 2015 – The Workshops

It is now about one month and a half till the start of Kamailio World Conference 2015. Continuing with the same event structure like in 2014, the afternoon of the first day, the 27th of May, is filled with several technical workshops. These sessions are intended to give a more hands-on perspective on the subjects, with deeper technical content.

Last year, Sipwise showed how to deploy sip:provide CE – the open source out of the box IP Telephony Operator Platform – in a matter of minutes and customize it to fit better your needs. This year, Daniel Grotti, a long time SIP and Kamailio fellow, is going to show how to enable WebRTC for sip:provider CE in order to bridge the communication between the web world and the classic SIP phones. Few other typical use cases will be approached during the session.

Carsten Bock, from NG Voice, is returning with another tutorial to show more of what can be done with Kamailio for IMS and VoLTE deployments. Besides the tutorial, the plan is to have a VoLTE testbed on site for the duration of the entire event, so the participants can test with their own devices.

After presenting at the past editions the concept and the development of CGRateS, a carrier grade open source CDR rating engine, Dan Bogos is now coming with a hands-on session about how to integrate it with Kamailio for prepaid and postpaid billing.

Ability to troubleshoot SIP routing and analyze the flows on the wire is one of the core elements required for VoIP engineers. Lorenzo Mangani, one of the co-founders of Homer SIP Capture project, is going to deliver a session on how to use existing open source tools (including Homer and sipgrep, but not limited to) to make the SIP troubleshooting process easier.

All together are providing an amazing amount of knowledge from the people with first hand experience, those that built the systems. It is a unique opportunity at Kamailio World to get face to face to interact with such people.

The content of conference days is filled with other very interesting sessions, including as well valuable technical details, presenting scalable and secure architectures or other products that can be used to complete the VoIP platforms with new features. Right now you can see details for a sections of presentations in the Schedule page.

Be sure you don’t miss Kamailio World Conference 2015, during May 27-29, in Berlin, Germany – it is the open source real time communications event in Europe!

Secure your participation and register now!

See you in Berlin!

From SQL Tables to Kamailio Hash Tables

Eloy Coto Pereiro has published recently another blog post that can be useful in the case one needs to cache content of custom database tables in Kamailio’s memory via htable module. The article uses Postgresql as database server, but same mechanism can be used for other database servers.

You can read the article at:

• http://acalustra.com/kamailio-from-tables-to-htables.html

Using caching is a good way to improve the performances and htable is a very flexible mechanism in Kamailio configuration file, with plenty of options to tune the caching rules.

Enjoy!

Kamailio v4.2.4 Released

Kamailio SIP Server v4.2.4 stable is out – a minor release including fixes in code and documentation since v4.2.3 – configuration file and database compatibility is preserved.

Kamailio (former OpenSER) v4.2.4 is based on the latest version of GIT branch 4.2, therefore those running previous 4.2.x versions are advised to upgrade. There is no change that has to be done to configuration file or database structure comparing with older v4.2.x.

Resources for Kamailio version 4.2.4

Source tarballs are available at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/4.2.4/src/

Detailed changelog:

• http://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/4.2.4/ChangeLog

Download via GIT:

 # git clone git://git.kamailio.org/kamailio kamailio
 # cd kamailio
 # git checkout -b 4.2 origin/4.2

Binaries and packages will be uploaded at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/4.2.4/

Modules’ documentation:

• http://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/4.2.x/

What is new in 4.2.x release series is summarized in the announcement of v4.2.0:

• http://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v4-2-0-release-notes/

Looking forward to meeting many of you at Kamailio World 2015!

VUC – 8 Years

The VoIP Users Conference is celebrating 8 years on the air. The weekly online meetup is going to have its 535th session during a 24 hours voipathon, starting at 12:00pm PDT (20:00 London time) on Thursday, the 2nd of April, 2015. You can find more details about the session, including the options to join via audio, video or irc, at:

• http://www.voipusersconference.org/2015/voipathon-2/

Big credits to Randy Resnick, who started VUC, kept it going every week for the past years and he is still steering its future. Kamailio developers and users are glad to have been part of many sessions, presenting about latest news related to the project or joining sessions to debate hot topics of the real time communications world at the moment.

Prepare yourself to pop up online and join the VUC voipathon even for a bit, say hi and tell shortly what is new in your world of communications!

Randy and many VUC friends will be at Kamailio World Conference 2015, May 27-29, in Berlin, Germany, with VUC Visions session – be sure don’t miss the event where you can meet the people that had a relevant impact in transformation of the real time communications over the past years and work on defining their future!

Update of Keepassx Autotyping on Mac OS X

Back in 2009 I published the article on this blog about doing autotyping in Keepassx for Mac OS X using AppleScript and some other helper application, MoreInternet. That article is available at:

• http://by-miconda.blogspot.de/2009/07/keepassx-mac-os-x-and-auto-typing.html

It is still a popular reading on my blog, however MoreInternet is no longer available for recent releases of Mac OS X. But that's for a better option as now Mac OS X can auto-register URL handlers on first run of an application that advertises the capability.

Lately I am using mainly iTerm2 instead of the classic Terminal.app, therefore I spent a bit of time in upgrading the AppleScript to fit better with my current environment, Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) and iTerm2 (as main option).

The AppleScript is available on GitHub, feel free to fork and make pull requests with enhancements:

• https://github.com/miconda/keepassx-autotyping-macosx

With the new version comes few alternatives of specifying the URL schema in order to make it nicer looking inside the Keepassx. The old format with 'kpx' is still available, allowing the variants:

  kpx://proto?username:password@address:port/path
  kpx://proto?username:password:address:port/path

The proto field can be ssh, http or https.

The new variants use kpx-proto for URL schema, getting rid of the strange url with 'proto?' inside it, resulting in something more closer to actual URLs. The new URL format is:

kpx-proto://username:password@address:port/path

Again, the proto can be ssh, http or https. For both formats, old and new, the port and path are optional. For ssh, the path must not be provided. Next are some examples:

kpx-ssh://alice:secret@10.0.0.10 

kpx-https://alice:secret@mywebsite.com/login

It is possible to use the KeePassX self expanding variables such as {USERNAME} or {PASSWORD}.

kpx-https://{USERNAME}:{PASSWORD}@mywebsite.com/login

Installation

Download the kpx.as file from GitHub repository.

Open Script Editor from Applications => Utilities, paste the content of kpx.as into it and export it as 'Application', save it as kpx.app somewhere on your disk.

With a text editor like 'vim', edit kpx.app/Contents/PkgInfo and set the content to "APPLokpx" (no double quotes). Edit kpx.app/Contents/Info.plist and set the bundle signature to the last 4 letters of the value in PkgInfo file and add details about 'kpx' URL handling, you should get to something like this:

    <key>CFBundleSignature</key> <string>okpx</string> <key>CFBundleURLTypes</key> <array> <dict> <key>CFBundleURLName</key> <string>KeePassX</string> <key>CFBundleURLSchemes</key> <array> <string>kpx</string> <string>kpx-ssh</string> <string>kpx-http</string> <string>kpx-https</string> </array> </dict> </array>

Note: CFBundleSignature should be there already, just update the string value. CFBundleURLTypes (and the array value) must be added.

Save the files you edited and the execute kpx.app from Finder. This operation is registering the kpx URL handlers. The execution is practically exiting immediately, but afterwards Keepassx will be able to launch it for its registered URL schemes.

Again, if you have an older version of Mac OS X, you may need to install More Internet application to register new URL handlers, for more details see the blog for older version of this script. Read that article if you didn't do it in the past, because it provides other useful hints for testing and using as well as screenshots.

Mentioned before that iTerm2 is preferred terminal, if you prefer the Terminal.all, edit the downloaded kpx.as and replace the line:

set myTerm to "iTerm2"

with:

set myTerm to "Terminal"

Then do the same steps as above for installation.

The terminal application is used for ssh handling. For http/https, the Safari browser is used.

An important note is to re-install and run the application every time you change something in the AppleScript file kpx.as, before attempting to use Keepassx with the modifications done in kpx.as.

Hopefully this article will be useful for some people out there!

No effective time to work on at this moment, but it in the future I am thinking to add the option to start mosh instead of ssh and work with other web browsers Chromium/Chrome, Firefox or Opera -- I haven't checked which browsers have support for AppleScript commands. Of course, these or other contributions are welcome!

Roadmap to Kamailio v4.3.0

Next major release of Kamailio is going to be versioned.

The plan to release it was sketched during the last IRC devel meeting back in February, proposing to get it out by beginning of June 2015. Given there has to be at least one month of testing, the next milestones to release date were proposed:

• freezing the development: Wednesday, April 22, 2015
• if testing goes smooth, then branching 4.3 after about one month: During the week starting May 18
• test more in beta phase, prepare packaging, etc. and release after 2-3 weeks: One of the days between June 4 and 11

You can join the discussion with other suggestions or adjustments on Kamailio mailing lists.