We are excited to announce the general availability of sip:providerCE mr5.1.1 and sip:providerPRO mr5.1.1.
What’s the sip:provider platform?
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 mr5.1.1?
The most important changes for mr5.1.1 compared to mr5.0 are:
- kamailio has been upgraded to version 4.4.5
- [PRO/Carrier] Packages elasticsearch rsyslog-elasticsearch openjdk-7-jre-headless were removed [TT#6711]
- [PRO/Carrier] Introduced a new “3rd Party Call Control” feature to support call and notifications integration with external APIs
- rtpengine configuration was moved from the /etc/defaults/ file to a dedicated config file in /etc/rtpengine/.
Legacy config options from the defaults file continue to be supported and take precedency over options found
in the config file, but users are urged to migrate custom config options from the defaults file to the config file [TT#5566] - Refactored voicemail date/time announcements, they are flexible and dynamically configured in say.conf,
to potentially support any language and desired formats. - ngcpcfg supports kernel modules to load on boot. Kernel module ‘dummy’ is available and disabled in config.yml. [TT#6640]
- [PRO/Carrier] faxserver number normalisation is also applied to emails
- timezones support for ngcp-panel, ngcp api and the voicemail announcements
- redis server init script supports self-healing to recover from corrupted redis aof file
- prosody modules updated from upstream; mod_sipwise_offline supports DB backend; mod_mam supports DB backend and urn:xmpp:mam:1
Is mr5.1 LTS (long time supported) release?
No. Release mr5.1 will be out of support once build mr5.1.2 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-c062a9d6
- AMI ID for region us-west-2: ami-6d7ef80d
- AMI ID for region us-west-1: ami-b5742bd5
- AMI ID for region eu-central-1: ami-7668a319
- AMI ID for region eu-west-1: ami-a2ad8dc4
- AMI ID for region ap-southeast-1: ami-22a81e41
- AMI ID for region ap-southeast-2: ami-3f00005c
- AMI ID for region ap-northeast-1: ami-3dffb05a
- AMI ID for region sa-east-1: ami-5be28537
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 mr5.1.1 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 mr5.1.1 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!