FreeSWITCH

Welcome to 2013!   Things are slowly returning to normal now that we're past the holidays. We did manage to have community conference calls over the past few weeks. We spent most of our time going over some handy tips and tricks. We also discussed ... [More] the new nested conditions feature. This week we will be having a community scrum and will be going over the status of the latest FreeSWITCH release. We will also be discussing a few ideas from the mailing list on how we might be able to get more volunteers working on Jiras.   We would like to take a moment to say thanks to those who have made international DIDs available for the FreeSWITCH public conference. We now have DIDs for Australia, Germany, Israel, Spain, UK, and USA. The DIDs are listed on each conference call agenda page and there is a note as to who provided each DID. Thanks to all who have lent a hand. If you are in a position to provide a DID for other countries please contact me off list.   Now that 2013 has hit we will be gearing up for the next ClueCon. There's only 210 days until ClueCon 2013! We will be sending out an official request for speaking proposals as well as contacting prospective event sponsors. We are looking forward to another great event.   Have a great week!   -Michael [Less]

I love hearing stories about how people put FreeSWITCH to good use. I think you'll enjoy this story from PA Consulting. There's a little video there as well. Check it out!   -Michael

Greetings!   We are glad to report that the FreeSWITCH team has tagged version 1.2.5.3. You can download the tarball here. Anyone using 1.2.5.x should update as soon as possible. We appreciate all those who have helped us with testing and tracking ... [More] down some sneaky and pernicious little bugs.   On last week's conference call we spent some time talking about the XML parser and some of its pre-processor directives. We discussed specifically how you can use the "exec" command to execute a shell script in the middle of XML processing. We also discussed a few tricks on how to look at the source code when you need to learn about some FreeSWITCH functionality that otherwise is not documented. This week's conference call subject is still pending, so stay tuned!   One other item I'd like to mention is that we've had several reports of FreeSWITCH success stories. We will be providing more information about those in upcoming stories on our Web site. We've got people using FreeSWITCH in various situations as well as software developers who've added support for FreeSWITCH to their offerings. The FreeSWITCH ecosystem continues to grow and flourish! Thank you all for being a part of it.   Take care and have a great week!   -Michael [Less]

Happy December to everyone!   Last week was painful for many of us as we were dealing with a sustained DDoS attack on most of our infrastructure. Kudos to the guys for working through it. It seems the worst is over and we can get back to the business ... [More] at hand: doing FreeSWITCH stuff. :)   In spite of the drama last week we did have a conference call and we released 1.2.5.2! We discussed mostly the details of the DDoS we experienced and how the community can assist in the future so that we can mitigate the effects of such an occurrence. With the community's help we will be more resistant to the effects of any future attacks. We appreciate the outpouring of support we received from everyone.   This week we will go back to discussing FreeSWITCH. We are still finalizing future guests so this week we'll do another installment of tips and tricks from the FreeSWITCH community. Among other things I will be showing how Chris Rienzo (IRC: crienzo) and I used the source this weekend to figure out what the XML preprocessor can do and get the wiki updated. I'll then show a simple example of the always-present-but-previously-undocumented command can do. As an added bonus we'll have an update on the ClueCon 2012 videos!   Thanks and have a great week. --Michael [Less]

Hello all!   We are all back to a full week after many of us enjoyed some well-deserved time off last week. However, even though there was a holiday here in the US, the intrepid FreeSWITCH development team was working hard on your behalf. As Ken Rice ... [More] previously mentioned, Anthony spotted a potential issue in the recently released 1.2.5 version. Therefore, this past Saturday they made 1.2.5.1 available for us. Many thanks to those who work so hard to make sure that FreeSWITCH is running smoothly for us all.   On last week's conference call we spent some time getting everyone up to speed on how to edit the FreeSWITCH wiki, specifically focusing on channel variables pages. Updating documentation is one of the least glamorous aspects of maintaining an open source project. Many thanks to those who've stepped up over the past weeks and months to help us out. With the end of the year upon us we are slowing down a bit in our speaking schedule for the weekly community conference call. We have a few things in the works but nothing yet scheduled. On this week's call we will be doing a community scrum. Be sure to bring your questions and topics for discussion. If you have a tip or trick that you'd like to share with the group that would be most welcomed. If time permits we will crowdsource a few selected questions from the mailing list.   Have a great week and we'll talk to you on Wednesday.   -Michael [Less]

Happy short week to those of you in North America!   The weekly FreeSWITCH news and notes took a hiatus while I was out on a medical leave. I am happy to report that I am back to work and recovering nicely. Many thanks to those who sent their ... [More] well-wishes and happy thoughts. We have a great community and I am glad to be a part of it!   On last week's conference call we covered some Linux/FreeSWITCH install and configuration tips. A special thanks to Ken Rice for giving us some practical information on many of the useful files and utility items that are available in the FreeSWITCH source tree and how to implement them, including FreeSWITCH init scripts, Anthony's .emacs file, and even a monit configuration example. I hope you found these items as useful as I did.   We recently released FreeSWITCH 1.2.4 and Ken Rice tells me that more updates are in the works. More information will be available on this week's conference call. This week I will be presenting a Wiki how-to: adding a channel variable page. This will be especially useful because it illustrates a number of Mediawiki concepts. Also, we have a lot of missing channel variables so if everyone picks one or two to add we'll be able to expand the wiki coverage.    Have a great week!   --Michael [Less]

Hello again!   Another busy week in the land of FreeSWITCH. As you know we have been doing some work on the FreeSWITCH project's infrastructure. We are happy to report that this work is essentially complete. Thank you for your patience in this ... [More] process. We've experienced intermittent outages but thanks to the efforts of Brian West and Raymond Chandler these have been kept to a minimum. We also thank Ken Rice for his hard work during this time. His knowledge and experience have been invaluable.   Last week we had a very interesting discussion from Chad Engler about his nodesl library - a connector between node.js and ESL. Chad describes himself as a Web developer learning the telephony side of things. However, we were all impressed with how much knowledge he had with using ESL given the relatively short amount of time he's been working with it. This week we will be looking in on some Windows-centric ways of handling real-time data and related PBX items. The following week, on October 31, we will be hearing from our friends over at Redshift Networks. They will be giving us close-up look at some of the worldwide SIP attacks that are being perpetrated against FreeSWITCH and other IP telephony servers.   On a personal note I would like to thank everyone who volunteered to be a technical reviewer of the new edition of the FreeSWITCH book. I was overwhelmed with just how many people who are willing to volunteer their time. Packt Publishing will be contacting those who've been selected for this important job. This is a great community and we are all glad to be a part of it.   Take care and have a great week.   -Michael [Less]

Greetings everyone!   As you may know the FreeSWITCH team is continuing to update the project's infrastructure. Among other things this includes getting ready for IPv6. Last week Brian West finished getting several of our servers all set up to handle ... [More] IPv6 traffic. These includes www.freeswitch.org and conference.freeswitch.org. Thank you to all those who did testing and gave us valuable feedback.   On last week's conference call we enjoyed our very own Ken Rice giving us some great reminders on how to gather data for troubleshooting as well as tips on opening bug reports in Jira. We had a number of users comment on how useful it was to see examples of how to do this. The audio is up in the usual location and we have a community member who is preparing a video which will be posted as soon as it is ready.   This week we have Chad Engler from Patlive coming to discuss with us his node-esl library. Chad has made the code available here on Github. He has included an interesting channel monitor example to give you an idea of what can be done by combining node.js with ESL. We look forward to hearing more about it on this week's conference call.   Have a great week!   -MIchael [Less]

Welcome to October! I hope the weather is nice where you are. Here it's still above 100F. :)   Last week was a little bit quieter than the previous few weeks. I had a chance to work on the FreeSWITCH change log and I made a list of some of the APIs ... [More] , dialplan tools, and channel variables. These have all been added since 1.2.0 was initially released in early August. All of them have wiki entries - thanks to those who took the initiative to do add them. Feel free to add your knowledge and experience to the mix.   Last week's conference call was an object lesson in the challenges of getting a SIP proxy working with TLS and FreeSWITCH. This week we are going to change direction and look at something that has been slowly (and painfully) advancing the past few years: mobile VoIP. We will be having Daniel Pocock share with us some information about Lumicall, an open source mobile VoIP client for Android devices. There is also a service component to Lumicall and we'll be learning about that as well. Come join us to see the state of mobile VoIP.   We are working on some fresh presentations for later this month. We hope to have an update on e164.org and how we can all get involved. We are also preparing a presentation on how to perform some of the data-gathering techniques that are needed for basic and advanced troubleshooting. If you have some input on these or other presentations please let me or Ken Rice know.     Thanks!   -Michael [Less]

Welcome to the last Monday of September 2012!   We've had quite the interesting week. Perhaps the most interesting item the team dealt with was a vulnerability in the Sofia SIP stack that would cause a segmentation fault while processing a specially ... [More] crafted SIP message. Just to show you how nimble the FreeSWITCH developers are, from the time the vulnerability was reported it took less than a day to fix, test, and roll a new version of FreeSWITCH. We encourage everyone on 1.2 to get updated to version 1.2.3 as soon as possible. (The fix is also in the 1.3 development branch as of last Wednesday, September 19.) We tip our hats to Anthony and the rest of the dev team for their hard work on our behalf.   Last week's conference call was also very informative. We received an introduction to the repro SIP proxy software. We look forward to this coming Wednesday where Scott Godin and Daniel Pocock will continue the discussion and will get deeper into how to set up the proxy and use it with FreeSWITCH. If you haven't already tried to install repro please do so. Daniel has a nice tutorial over at OpenTelecoms.org - be sure to check it out and bring your questions on Wednesday.   Finally, we'd like to draw your attention to this blog post by long time FreeSWITCH and open source telephony supporter Kristian Kielhofner. Kristian reports that his company, Star2Star Communications, is sponsoring the FreeSWITCH stable branch by giving direct financial support to the project. This allows for a full-time team member to work on things like the stable branch and packaging as well as community interaction and documentation. We appreciate those who support FreeSWITCH and open source telephony!   Have a good week and we'll see you again in October.   -Michael [Less]