We are excited to announce the general availability of sip:providerCE mr5.3.2 and sip:providerPRO mr5.3.2.

What’s the sip:provider platform?

sip:provider PRO Architecture Overview

The Sipwise sip:provider platform is a highly versatile open source based VoIP soft-switch for ISPs and ITSPs to serve large numbers of SIP subscribers. It leverages existing building blocks like Kamailio, Sems and Asterisk to create a feature-rich and high-performance system by glueing them together in a best-practice approach and implementing missing pieces on top of it.

Sipwise engineers have been working with Asterisk and Kamailio (and its predecessors SER and OpenSER) since 2004, and have roles on the management board of Kamailio and are contributing to these projects both in terms of patches and also financially by sponsoring development tasks. The sip:provider platform is available as a Community Edition (SPCE), which is fully free and open source, and as a commercial PRO appliance shipped turn-key in a high availability setup.

The SPCE provides secure and feature-rich voice and video communication to end customers (voice, video, instant messaging, presence, buddy lists, file transfer, screen sharing, remote desktop control) and connect them to other SIP-, Mobile- or traditional PSTN-networks. It can therefore act as open Skype replacement system, traditional PSTN replacement, Over-The-Top (OTT) platform and also as a Session Border Controller in front of existing VoIP services in order to enable signaling encryption, IPv6 support, fraud- and Denial-of-Service prevention. Another use-case is to act as a Class4 SIP concentrator to bundle multiple SIP peerings for other VoIP services.

What’s new in mr5.3.2?

The most important changes for mr5.3.2 compared to mr5.2 are:

  • Implemented call recording based on rtpengine framework.
  • Implemented selective peer probing via SIP OPTIONS ping.
  • Switched ngcp-panel  from its custom RRD-based monitoring dashboard to grafana dashboards based on influxdb.
  • Replaced metrics gathering framework collectd and its RRD backend by telegraf and influxdb.
    • old RRD files will be preserved on the system, but not used by the monitoring infrastructure.
    • some of the checks previously done by ngcp-witnessd are now done natively by telegraf.
    • there is a new ngcp-influxdb-extract script that replaces the old rrd_extract script.
  • Added possibility to trace Kamailio memory usage per module.
  • Added “ngcpcfg clean“ to clean ngcpcfg framework (see available options in “man ngcpcfg”).
  • Added cdr source/destination_user_out fields to track peer rewrite.
  • Implemented capability to allow/reject SIP messages based on SIP User-Agent patterns.
  • Improved support of User-Agents using tel URI scheme in From/PAI/Diversion.
  • Outbound registrations use the outbound_socket preference from the corresponding peers (enable option sems.db_reg_agent.fetch_extra_sockets_from_peer in config.yml).
  • Improved cleanuptools speed for large amount of CDRs.
  • Improved code quality by extending and introducing perlcritic/shellcheck/coverity/lintian checks.

 See the list of all changes in PDF Changelog mr5.3.2

Is mr5.3 LTS (long time supported) release?

No. Release mr5.3 is no longer supported as build mr5.3.2 has been published.

How do I test-drive the new version?

As usual, we’re providing a VMWare Image, a Virtualbox Image and a Vagrant Box for quick evaluation testing. For those of you using Amazon Cloud we provide the EC2 AMIs in the following regions:

  • AMI ID for region us-east-1: ami-8caeaff7
  • AMI ID for region us-west-2: ami-656a831d
  • AMI ID for region us-west-1: ami-c7d6e3a7
  • AMI ID for region eu-central-1: ami-ee1bb081
  • AMI ID for region eu-west-1: ami-00ce3779
  • AMI ID for region ap-southeast-1: ami-1b3a5a78
  • AMI ID for region ap-southeast-2: ami-74110b17
  • AMI ID for region ap-northeast-1: ami-11807f77
  • AMI ID for region sa-east-1: ami-95f181f9

Check the relevant section in SPCE Handbook for detailed instructions.

How do I install the new version or upgrade from an older one?

For new users, please follow the Installation Instructions in the Handbook to set up the SPCE mr5.3.2 from scratch.

For the users of the previous version of the SPCE, please follow the upgrade procedure outlined in the Handbook. If you have customized your configurations using customtt.tt2 files, you must migrate your changes to the new configuration files after the upgrade, otherwise all your calls will most certainly fail.

How can I contribute to the project?

Over the last months we’ve started to publish our software components at github.com/sipwise. This is still an on-going effort, which is done on a component-per-component basis. Please check back regularly for new projects to appear there, and feel free to fork them and send us pull requests. For development related questions, please subscribe to our SPCE-Dev Mailing-List at lists.sipwise.com/listinfo/spce-dev.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank our PRO customers and the SPCE community for their feedback, bug reports and feature suggestions to make this release happen. We hope you enjoy using the mr5.3.2 build and keep your input coming. A big thank you also to all the developers of Kamailio, Sems and Prosody, who make it possible for us to provide an innovative and future-proof SIP/XMPP engine as the core of our platform! And last but not least a HUGE thank you to the Sipwise development team, who worked insanely hard to create this release. You are awesome!