OpenSER v1.3.0 Released

On the 13th of December, 2007, OpenSER reached the milestone of version 1.3.0.

There are many new modules, lot of enhancements in functionality and robustness. The migration from series 1.2.x to 1.3.0 should be pretty easy, check:
http://www.openser.org/dokuwiki/doku.php/install:1.2.2-to-1.3.0

The release remarks itself by the amount of contributions from different companies or academic institutes: CISCO Systems with Berkeley DB extensions, University of North Carolina with LDAP extensions, 1&1 with config utilities and carrier routing, Connecticut College with SCTP support.

More details about OpenSER 1.3.0 you can find at:
http://www.openser.org/mos/view/OpenSER-v1.3.x-Release-Notes/

Fall Boston 2007 Follow Up

Another major VoIP event just ended. Time spent there was too short, or I was too busy in those few hours I could roam freely to get the real pulse of the show. The next day was full for me with the OpenSER Admin Training Session and BoF.

Those interested in the materials, follow next link and download the slides from the course of BoF session:

http://www.openser.org/events/2007-VoN-Fall-Boston/

Beside OpenSER-dedicated day on the 1st of November, I attended the "Asterisk & OpenSER: A balanced network strategy", part of the Digium Asterisk World, and I was pleased to see large interest in using the two applications together. It is clear to more and more people that the two are completing each other, not competing. The efforts to make the integration easier show now the results.

As usual, several active members from the community showed up, being nice to associate names with faces and chat a bit.

OpenSER BoF at VoN Fall Boston 2007

Along with the OpenSER admin training session, the project has the opportunity to show its presence in the market within 1h15 session, just after the lunch on the 1st of November, starting with 12:45.

The panelists are:

Alan Crosswell, Senior Director - Network Infrastructure, Columbia University
Daniel-Constantin Mierla, Co-Founder OpenSER
James Body, Director - Networks, Truphone
Jim Dalton, CEO, TransNexus
Norman Brandinger, President, GOES.com
Xavier Casajuana, CEO, VozTelecom - OIGAA

I will do a short update of the project status, where we are and what should make you move to upcoming 1.3 release as soon as it is released. Alan will share his experience in using OpenSER and Open Source to build the VoIP communication platform in one of the most famous Universities in IT, James will continue his story with OpenSER and Mobile VoIP, while Jim comes to present the OpenSER and OSP, a true solution for peering. Norman, old OpenSER folk, very active in the community, will speak about what is keeping him connected to the project and how the project helps his business. Xavier is just to speak about his latest VoIP innovation, OIGAA, where O is from OpenSER ( ;-) )

More details here...

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 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 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 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 :-) .

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

OpenSER at ClueCon 2007

ClueCon - Telephony Developer Conference - is an annual 3-Day Telephony User and Developer Conference bringing together the entire spectrum of Telephony from TDM circuits to VoIP and everything in between. It take place in Chicago, Il, USA, June 26-28, 2007.

OpenSER will have one hour session, Tuesday, June 26, 16:00-17:00.

More details:

http://www.cluecon.com/

VoN Europe 2007

The last VoN in Europe provided another great chance to meet people around the project, learn about latest trends in VoIP and discuss latest businesses in the area.

OpenSER had itself one hour session in the main theater of VoN Exhibition, giving opportunity to present a summary of the project, the status of WeSIP application server, FMC solutions based on OpenSER, as well as the strong bullets brought by 1.2.x release.

The VoN seemed quite this time, some noise around P2PSIP and peering, a lot of FMC discussions, less and less IMS interest. Despite that, we had very nice meetings with VoIPUser friends and open source VoIP developers.

Slides from OpenSER BoF and photos from the event to be made available soon.

OpenSER Advanced Programming Course 2007

Between the 4th and 6th of June 2007, INRIA, the IT research institute of France, hosted in Paris the first edition of OpenSER Advanced Programming Course. The teachers were myself and Bogdan-Andrei Iancu.

We focused on the internals of OpenSER application, touching delicate subjects as memory manager, locking system, data lumps, pseudo-variables, module development a.s.o. The three days were a good opportunity to discuss also about future plans, what should be nice to have, where is the current bottle neck. All agreed that some work in interfacing with database has to be done, maybe some efforts to make parts of script reloading, lumps applying, and, if possible, some asynchronous processing in regard to TCP and DNS.

The attendants span several countries: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Germany, Italy, UK, Romania, Sweden, and, of course, France.

Here you can find the group photo:
OpenSER Dev INRIA Photo.

OpenSER at LinuxTag 2007

The full four days at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany, were an opportunity to meet old folks from the FhG FOKUS Institute, were our trip in VoIP started back in 2001-2002.

The show itself was pretty well organized, with high quality exhibition booths and good presentation. You could see the German style around, even for Open Source, everything has to be perfect.

The VoIP was quite poor represented there, in our corner we were colleagues only with Asterisk, bringing a lot of questions like: "What is the difference between?". We met several OpenSER friends, some time was spent with the squad from SunCC compiler, trying to fix some issues encountering when using this tool with some architecture specific code on Linux.

Next year, the event will be taking place on the same location, allowing more time for advertising. As a plan, will be trial of VoIPing the exhibition infrastructure, so that you can get a device and listen the speeches from your booth or while spinning around.

Some pictures will be posted soon.

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.

OpenSER on the road, May-June 2007

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

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 OpenSER website.

OpenSER 1.3.0 campaign started

As 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 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 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 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.openser.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.

OpenSER - Summary of 2007

2007 was a year full of achievements and events for 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.openser.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=68

Since then we went though many milestones. We had the first 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.openser.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.openser.org/docs/modules/1.2.x/
http://www.openser.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 OpenSER...

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

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://openser.org/pipermail/users/2006-November/007841.html

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

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.

OpenSER Summit 2006 - Closing notes

Last posts on this blog are short reviews of the presentations held at OpenSER Summit 2006. It was an opening session on the afternoon of 7th November, continued by a full day on the 8th. Totally were 17 speeches, sustained by breaks for face-to-face talks with developers, executives and community members.

We look forward to next OpenSER event, the place was not decided yet, is very likely to happen in Europe or North America. When settled, news will be published on this blog, OpenSER mailing lists and website.

You can get all slides and view pictures with attendants of OpenSER Summit 2006 from:
http://www.openser.org/events/2006-OpenSER-Summit/slides/
http://www.openser.org/events/2006-OpenSER-Summit/photos/

OpenSER Summit 2006 - Asterisk

We had the chance of a good talk held by Olle E. Johansson, Edvina, the father of SIP channel in Asterisk. He provided a good overview of how OpenSER and Asterisk can be used together to provide feature rich VoIP service. Furthermore, he talked about Asterisk 1.4 and future plans for SIP.

Aside this a good remark was lack of good collaboration between major players in Open Source telephony. We all have to work on this, to collaborate to build an Open Telephony Platform. There will be no application that will achieve that alone. We should gather our knowledge and forces to make it possible.

I end with same topic as he did. Lot of people try to promote security as a big hole in VoIP versus PSTN. Next image from the slides is very much relevant (:-) in this respect: pstn-security.jpg.

Download slides of Asterisk Presentation

OpenSER Summit 2006 - The Challenge of Service Diversity

Bogdan-Andrei Iancu, co-founder of OpenSER Project, CEO Voice System, talked about the implications of VoIP diversity. Features base and deployment characteristics have big impact in maintenance and management of the VoIP platform.

The discussion covered four use cases and solutions in VoIP: carrier, hosted services, residential services and billing systems. Each case has its set of special issues that has to be taken care of: scalability, load balancing, dynamic routing, peering, system resources... The conclusions summarized several points that should be considered when designed a complex VoIP system.

Download slides of The Challenge of SIP Diversity

OpenSER Summit 2006 - INRIA - SIP.edu Deployment Notes

SIP.edu Working Group aims to interconnect academic institutes all over the world via VoIP/SIP. We had as special guest Phillipe Sultan from INRIA, the National Reasearch Institute of France. He gave a comprehensive overview of their goals and achievements so far.

Most of the components used in SIP.edu deployments are open source. The first step was to make available existing user directory via VoIP. The email address is used as principal VoIP ID. In addition, local PBX extensions are made available on VoIP. So far, major universities and research institutes of US and Europe joined in SIP.edu project: MIT, Yale, Harvard, Columbia University, INRIA, more here ...

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OpenSER Summit 2006 - Development of convergent J2EE applications for OpenSER

A more technical approach of writing VoIP Java applications for OpenSER and WeSIP was given by Elias Baixas of Voztelecom. He went through SIP servlet concept and how its API eases the development of VoIP application without any need of technical details about SIP/VoIP internals.

With about two slides of Java code you can embed in your web application a VoIP click to dial feature. Also, as showed in the slides, WeSIP provides seamless interoperation of SIP and HTTP Servlets. web developers will find lot of similarities that will make VoIP SIP Servlets something easy to do if you have HTTP Servlet knowledge.

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OpenSER Summit 2006 - Managing a Highly Available VoIP System

Andreas Granig of UPC Austria introduced causes for VoIP services downtime and options to solve for them. It is clear that a reliable service cannot resist without high availability. With perfect hardware you will get software failures, with perfect software you will get a hardware crash at a point in time.

Two concept should guide your service as much as possible: simplicity and modularity. Try to keep your deployments as simple as possible for the set of services you want to offer. The maintenance overhead is lowered. Second, try to make the platform as modular as possible -- is very unlikely that all components will fail at the same time -- you will have features downtime, but not service downtime.

Download slides of Managing a Highly Available VoIP System.