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.