OPENSER Dinner, Barcelona - remarks

May 6, 2008, Barcelona, Spain, OPENSER Social Networking Event at El Glop, in the city center.

A great dinner put together by Jesus Rodriguez (OPENSER developer, FreeBSD package maintainer, CTO at Voztelecom), Daniel-Constantin Mierla (co-founder and developer OPENSER, CEO at asipto.com) and Inaki Baz Castillo (VoIP and OPENSER Consultant at limit.es).

All together were 20 people, including the elite of Spanish VoIP Blogging Army: Jesus Rodriguez (http://www.jerocu.net), Alberto Sagredo (http://www.voipnovatos.es), Sergio Serrano (http://www.asterisktron.org).

Well known to OPENSER and Asterisk environments: Olle E. Johansson, Elena-Ramona Modroiu, Gines Gomes, Elias Baixas, Pascal Maugeri, Victor Pascual Avilla, Nacho Cabrera Ramos.

See some pictures I selected from the ones taken by Alberto Sagredo:
http://www.asipto.com/photos/BARCELONA2008-ALBUM/

Food was excellent (thanks Jesus for selecting the place), so the discussions, as we were staying long after leaving the restaurant to talk outside. Of course, some went to a pub at the usual time in Spain 1:00am.

Next are Vienna and Berlin...

OPENSER Dinner - El Glop, Barcelona, May 6, 2008

The OPENSER dinner in Barcelona, Spain, May 6, 9:00PM, takes place at "Braseria El Glop".

http://www.elglop.com/

There will be about 20-25 persons, among them:

- Olle E. Johansson, main Asterisk SIP developer, CEO at http://www.edvina.net
- Elena-Ramona Modroiu, co-founder OpenSER, COO at http://www.asipto.com
- Jesus Rodriguez, developer OpenSER -- FreeBSD packages maintainer, CTO at http://www.voztele.com
- Daniel-Constantin Mierla, co-founder OpenSER, CEO at http://www.asipto.com
- Inaki Baz Castillo - OpenSER mailing list activist, VoIP consultant
- Alberto Sagredo - http://www.voipnovatos.es
- several other openser, wesip (http://www.wesip.com) and asterisk folks

OPENSER Book

Just returning from my trip in Florida, I am catching up with some events happening around the project.

First book about OPENSER was published by Packt Publishing, authored by Flavio E. Goncalves. I did technical review of the book and waiting now for the hardcopy version of it. More details at:

http://www.packtpub.com/building-telephony-systems-with-openser/book

Oracle Support

Courtesy of Iouri Kharon, a new developer, the development branch of OPENSER includes now native support for connecting to ORACLE databases. Previously possible via UNIXODBC driver, the new module named db_oracle brings more flexibility when using this powerful database server.

The readme of the module is available at:
http://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/devel/db_oracle.html

The module will be include in next major release 1.4.0.

OpenSER-Asterisk SIP Masterclass, Barcelona, Spain

The Asterisk SIP Masterclass is a five days of advanced Asterisk and OpenSER SIP proxy training, focusing on how to make Asterisk work in a SIP network. The class assumes a good of knowledge about Asterisk.

Location: Barcelona, Spain
Date: May 5-9, 2008

The training is sustained by the main Asterisk SIP developer, Olle E. Johansson and Daniel-Constantin Mierla, the OpenSER project co-founder and developer. They have many years of experience together, building VoIP networks and debugging all kinds of issues in the software, network and the SIP protocol. This is an opportunity to spend a week learning and working with these OpenSER, SIP and Asterisk developers.

This class includes many practical labs. Feel free to bring your own equipment to the class - SIP phones, gateways, servers. We will have a classroom network filled with Asterisk servers, SIP proxies and devices to work with. It’s a good opportunity to test your devices!

More details at: edvina.net and asipto.com.

OpenSER Social Networking - ROSDEV2008

The fist OpenSER social networking event took place in Bucharest, Romania, Apr 12, 2008. It was together with the folks at ROSDEV2008. From the OpenSER mailing lists, you may recognize in pictures people like: Dan Bogos, Elena-Ramona Modroiu and Daniel-Constantin Mierla (that's myself).

There were other people at the event using OpenSER -- see the presentation about VoIP in the University Campus -- and we were able to conduct constructive discussions about VoIP in general. Apart of that, it was quite a hot spring day (over 25 Celsius), so the rest was about beer and good food in a typical Romanian restaurant. Here are links to photo albums and videos from ROSDEV2008 and the diner afterwards.

http://www.asipto.com/photos/ROSDEV2008-ALBUM/
http://www.asipto.com/photos/ROSDEV2008-1-ALBUM/
http://www.tfm.ro/conferinta-rosdev-2008/

Next day it was an applied seminar of VoIP and OpenSER, photos at:
http://www.asipto.com/photos/ROSDEV2008-VOIP-ALBUM/

ROSDEV2008

This post mainly addresses to Romanians around OPENSER Project and Open Source VoIP.

The second edition of Romanian Open Source Development Conference (ROSDEV2008) is taking place tomorrow, April 12, 10:00-18:00, at University “Politehnica” Bucharest, Computer Science Department, Hall EG301. It is an event organized for Open Source developers by Open Source developers.

It is the place to meet lot of Open Source projects, many programmers and companies interested in this philosophy.

I will have a short talk about what means life as Open Source developer, OPENSER and other VoIP technologies.

It is a merit for the organizers to bring one of the top 3 television channels in Romania to broadcast the event on Internet. More details at (Romanian only):

http://www.rosdev.ro

Live broadcasting:

http://www.protv.ro/live2

OPENSER Devel Guide

Daniel-Constantin Mierla and Elena-Ramona Modroiu, co-founders OPENSER, authored the OPENSER Devel Guide. It is comprehensive tutorial, approaching the important components of OPENSER: memory manager, locking system, pseudo-variables, transformations, statistics, configuration file, db and timer api, module interface and so on.

The document is intended to give the knowledge for those willing to develop extensions for OPENSER and to show its internal structure. The tutorial is available at:

http://www.asipto.com/pub/openser-devel-guide/

OpenSER eLearning and Certification programs

ASIPTO is offering certification and eLearning programs for OPENSER SIP Server, backed up by two co-founders of the project.

OPENSER is a complex platform, testing the knowledge about and passing the certification proofs the professional expertise gained working with this technology.

eLearning channels address the major issues of VoIP platform in the real world. Understanding the root of the issues and learning the right solutions to solve them is what the classes focus on.

More details at www.asipto.com

OpenSER Social Networking Events - April-June 2008

In the period of time April - June 2008, there will be a series of OpenSER Social Networking events organized in different places world wide, during the time some other Open Source or VoIP events take place in the same city.

The events are most probably in the form of a dinner, organized together with local representatives of OpenSER community. The events are intended to be rather small size, to allow each one to know the others, in a nice and friendly discussion environment. The primary goal is to strengthen the relations within community and give opportunity to network for collaboration and business. Participation to any of these events is free, everybody pays for its expenses. Anyone interested in OpenSER, SIP or VoIP in general is welcome to join.

Next events are:

- Bucharest, Romania, April 12, 2008, tied up with ROSDEV2008 (www.rosdev.ro - Romanian site only)
- Orlando, FL, USA, April 22, 2008, tied up with OPENSER-Asterisk SIP Masterclass (www.edvina.net)
- Barcelona, Spain, May 6, 2008, tied up with OPENSER-Asterisk SIP Masterclass (www.avanzada7.com)
- Vienna, Austria, May 24, 2008, on the way to AsteriskTag (www.asterisk-tag.org)
- Berlin, Germany, May 28, 2008, tied up with LinuxTag (www.linuxtag.org)
- Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 3, 2008, tied up with VoN.x Europe (www.von.com)

The hour and exact place for each event will be announced few days before as the number of attending people is known and the reservation is done.

Although you are welcome to come at any time and without prior notice, you may find that there is no more available seat to join the table. To reserve a seat or join in the organization of an event, contact Daniel-Constantin Mierla <miconda [at] gmail [dot] com>.

Reports about OpenSER

Proud to mirror some details from the blog of Virtual Hosting, that nominated OpenSER in their top of Open Source VoIP applications -- and we got to the position #1, although it is clear is not a ordered list, but...

More details here....

Moreover, another blogger made an analysis of German VoIP market and shows that billions of minutes per month are routed with Open Source applications, and of course, OpenSER has its big share, sustaining one of the biggest VoIP service in the world.

More details here...

1.76 million of users on an OpenSER-based platform is not bad at all...

Asterisk-OpenSER SIP Masterclass, Orlando, FL, USA

Date: April 21-25
Place: Orlando, Florida, USA

Learn Asterisk, OPENSER and SIP from the main developers!

The training is sustained by the main Asterisk SIP developer, Olle E. Johansson and Daniel-Constatin Mierla, the OpenSER project co-founder and developer. They have many years of experience together, building VoIP networks and debugging all kinds of issues in the software, network and the SIP protocol. This is an unique opportunity to spend a week learning and working with these OpenSER, SIP and Asterisk folks.

This class focuses on building a carrier-class scalable network architecture with Asterisk and OpenSER. You need to know Asterisk at the level of the Asterisk Bootcamp or the Asterisk Masterclass by Edvina in order to e able to take this class. Learn more about course content here:

http://edvina.net/training/sipmasterclass/index.shtm

More details at edvina.net.

Registration by email at info (at) edvina.net

Module Documentation Now In Docbook XML Format

Migration from SGML to XML Docbook format is now ended for all OpenSER modules.

The format is much more flexible and allows easier conversion to different format. Using XSL, the look can become more user friendly, we can generate summaries, indexes and references to parameters, functions, MI commands and pseudo-variables exported by modules. Another target is creation of an aggregated tutorial, combining these documents along with a getting started guide.

Modules' documentation repository in HTML format can be found at:

http://www.openser.org/docs/modules/devel/

New documentation effort

Recently, the openser-docs mailing list was created to conduct the development on OpenSER documentation. If you want to join go to:

http://lists.openser.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openser-docs

Immediate task is to create a master document where to refer the rest of documents, the entry point for new comers. The dokuwiki is already an impressive knowledge base, but lacks somehow a good index.

Another subject is to migrate the format to Docbook XML.The amount of available tools and the strict formating in XML provide easier ways to manage and convert to readable formants.

Off topic, worth to mention that RTPProxy got its own mailing list:
http://lists.rtpproxy.org/mailmn/listinfo.

Shared variables in configuration script

OpenSER is a multiprocess application. Sometimes, as an VoIP administrator of an OpenSER based platform, you feel the need to have a variable whose value is visible in all OpenSER processes.

Few days ago, the cfgutils module introduced this feature. A shared variable is specified via $shv(name), name can be any string of alpha-numeric characters. The shared variables can be initialized via a parameter of the cfgutils module. Also, they can be set via MI commands, giving the possibility to control routing logic in a nice way, without restarting OpenSER.

xlog was enhanced to take the log lever from any pseudo-variable, including shared variables. Now you can enable/disable printing of the log messages via MI.

Example of usage:

---
debug=3
...
loadmodule "cfgutils.so"
...
modparam("cfgutils", "shvset", "debug=i:4")
...
xlog("$shv(debug)", "request [$rm] from [$fu] to [$ru]\n");
---

To get your xlog message printed, issue the command:

# openserct fifo shv_set debug int 3


More details at:

http://www.openser.org/docs/modules/devel/cfgutils.html
http://www.openser.org/docs/modules/devel/xlog.html