We are excited to announce the general availability of the Sipwise C5CE and C5PRO mr6.5.7 release.

What is the Sipwise C5 platform?

Sipwise C5 PRO Architecture Overview

The Sipwise C5 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 Sipwise C5 platform is available as a Community Edition (CE), which is fully free and open source, and as a commercial PRO appliance shipped turn-key in a high availability setup.

The Sipwise C5 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 mr6.5.7?

The most important changes for mr6.5 compared to mr6.4 are:

  • [Carrier] Added support for new Lenovo SN550 hardware nodes (both SSD and NVMe) [TT#42456]
  • [PRO/Carrier] MariaDB replication has been migrated to GTID [TT#33275]
  • [Carrier] Local database on proxy nodes replicated from all DB servers simultaneously [TT#33275]
  • Installation and initial configuration were separated to allow rollback in the future [TT#37257]
  • Add new disk partitioning schema. UEFI and software raids are supported now. See documentation for more details. [TT#44197]
  • New ‘data’ partition has been introduced, it will support rollback after upgrades in future releases. No changes happen during upgrade on the current installation. [TT#44823]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Implement email templates support for faxserver messages [TT#33108]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Improved LI (Lawful Intercept) role definition and usage [TT#38200]
  • The ngcpcfg YML files validation has been enabled by default [TT#8405]
  • Improved SEMS and ngcp-witnessd idle CPU usage [TT#43805, TT#43952]
  • Migrated most of Sipwise services to Systemd type ‘notify’ [TT#28100]
  • Upgrade influxdb 1.1.5 to 1.6.1 [TT#28100]
  • API new “use_owner_tz parameter to use a timezone of the resource owner [TT#41022]
  • Enhanced billing_fees matching logic flexibility and performance by introducing additional match modes [TT#41553]
  • New API v2.0 Swagger based documentation [TT#44116]
  • Enhanced performance of the Call Lists Panel UI by introducing a strict search mode and query optimizations [TT#43653]
  • Improved the cleanup tools logic and simplified the config options, “backup-months” is renamed into “keep-month” and “backup-retro” is removed [TT#43164]
  • [CE] Voicemail sounds now use the base voicemail-sounds by default [TT#44091]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Improved PBX “subscriberadmin” scope of access and profile usage. PBX “subscriberadmin” is now by default able to modify other subscribers within the same customer as well as work with only the inherited subscriber profiles [TT#43266]

See the list of all changes in PDF Changelog_mr6.5.7

What is mr6.5.7?

The build mr6.5.7 is the next build for supported LTS release mr6.5, mr6.5.7 provides new features and bugfixes.

Is mr6.5 LTS (long time supported) release?

Yes, the release mr6.5 is an official LTS release. It will be supported till build mr6.5.14. See the release calendar on https://www.sipwise.com/releases/.

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 ap-northeast-1: ami-0a417a73a60437c27
  • AMI ID for region ap-southeast-1: ami-06a415277f7b7ef5a
  • AMI ID for region ap-southeast-2: ami-00204447c3c25e176
  • AMI ID for region eu-central-1: ami-036420df23bf3ab6b
  • AMI ID for region eu-west-1: ami-03b2f03b73cf291fd
  • AMI ID for region sa-east-1: ami-0af61f4d011fd968a
  • AMI ID for region us-east-1: ami-084ad83b4200a179b
  • AMI ID for region us-west-1: ami-0aec787b05959f3c4
  • AMI ID for region us-west-2: ami-00bb67079d6eacfc9

Check the relevant section in the Sipwise C5 CE 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 Sipwise C5 CE mr6.5.7 from scratch.

For the users of the previous version of Sipwise C5 CE, 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. Hint: modern patchtt.tt2 framework can help you here in the future.

How can I contribute to the project?

Sipwise is publishing software components at github.com/sipwise. Please check it 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 Dev Mailing-List.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank our PRO/Carrier customers and the Sipwise C5 CE community for their feedback, bug reports and feature suggestions to make this release happen. We hope you enjoy using our software 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!