We are excited to announce the general availability of sip:providerCE mr5.4.2 and sip:providerPRO mr5.4.2.

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 mr5.4.2?

The most important changes for mr5.4.2 compared to mr5.3 are:

  • [PRO/Carrier] Implement new Apple push protocol for iOS SIP:Phone application [TT#14952]
  • Introduce maintenance mode for ngcp-upgrade [TT#16751]
  • Switch from the YAML and YAML::Tiny Perl modules to the modern YAML::XS [TT#17650]
  • Implement new network.yml dynamic validator program. [TT#14817]
  • [Carrier] Introduce node status at network.yml to be able to add more nodes to the cluster without affecting a running system [TT#16316]
  • The ngcp-snmp-agent daemon now exposes OIDs and emits traps for peer host status. [TT#16530, TT#17602]
  • The ngcp-witnessd daemon now collects extended Kamailio statistics. [TT#2399]
  • The ngcp-sercmd program has gained a new memdbg command. [TT#16548]
  • The ngcp-check_active has been renamed to ngcp-check-active, and has gained a new -v option. [TT#16850]
  • New ngcp-type, ngcp-make-active and ngcp-make-standby scripts. [TT#16850]
  • The ngcpcfg program gained new set and del commands. [TT#16903]
  • added option kamailio.lb.remove_isup_body_from_replies [TT#17453]
  • kamailio: control debug per module via config.yml [TT#17200]
  • [PRO/Carrier] added huntgroup display-name support for PBX hunt indicator [TT#14840]

 See the list of all changes in PDF Changelog_mr5.4.2

Is mr5.4 LTS (long time supported) release?

No. Release mr5.4 is no longer supported as build mr5.4.2 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-eff66195
  • AMI ID for region us-west-2: ami-204b9758
  • AMI ID for region us-west-1: ami-3d7d465d
  • AMI ID for region eu-central-1: ami-cbe36ea4
  • AMI ID for region eu-west-1: ami-46e5543f
  • AMI ID for region ap-southeast-1: ami-4a2d7c29
  • AMI ID for region ap-southeast-2: ami-4104ee23
  • AMI ID for region ap-northeast-1: ami-8d2498eb
  • AMI ID for region sa-east-1: ami-88e2a7e4

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 mr5.4.2 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?

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 SPCE-Dev Mailing-List at lists.sipwise.com/listinfo/spce-dev.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank our PRO/Carrier customers and the SPCE 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!