Disclaimer: I am affiliated with SER, iptel.org and allthough attempting to give an objective account from a user perspective, I will probably be accused of being biased in many of the things I state.
-------------
You may want to read the SER - Getting Started document
http://www.iptel.org/ser/doc/gettingstarted
and especially:
http://siprouter.onsip.org/doc/gettingstarted/ch03.html

Since that was written, OpenSER has released 1.0 and 1.1, while SER is now about to release its first major release since the fork.

I haven't followed OpenSER closely, so I cannot speak for it, but SER's upcoming release addresses many of the major shortcomings found in SER/OpenSER's shared roots, i.e. SER 0.9.x.  These changes include a major rewrite of timers, as well as big improvement in the database model.

AFAIK, the module interfaces are still fairly similar, but a major difference in how variables and message data is manipulated (thus causing modules to be different): openser has further developed the pseudo-variables introduced with avpops module, while SER has introduced selects.  Which one you prefer is a matter of taste, but IMHO ser.cfg for upcoming SER is greatly easier to read, as well as maintain compared to the pseudo-variable approach, and it is my firm opinion that new users will find SER more intuitive to use when they start getting their teeth into SIP server configuration and maintenance.

As for documentation, the SER pre-release does not have complete documentation, and yes, the documentation effort is lagging behind a bit.  I'm in charge of that effort, and the goal is to have a satisfactory set of documentation for the upcoming release.  The last few months of improvements at iptel.org are evidence of that process.  OpenSER has focused on documentation and seems to have a fairly good documentation.

Finally, to your wish of combining ser and openser: ser and openser have some shared modules, but only where the developers have commited to maintaining in both environments.  The cores are by now also quite far apart.  So, as each project has its own priorities, expect some features to developed in both (by different developers and different code), while other features to be only found in one.

In the end, it boils down to which piece of software you feel satisfies your needs, whether you have confidence in the project moving in the direction you need, and whether the project will deliver the software in a satisfactory, bug-free condition at the intervals you need.
g-)

Rao Ramaratnamma wrote:
sorry for reposting -- I think this question belongs to both mailing list.
I am really stuck with this.

rr

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Rao Ramaratnamma <raramarat@yahoo.com>
To: Christian Schlatter <cs@unc.edu>; users@openser.org
Sent: Tuesday, November 7, 2006 11:15:27 PM
Subject: Re: [Users] TM : retransmission timers

the ser ottendorf announcement does mention improved timers. Cannot openser include this feature too and cannot I merge ser with openser for good timers? I am still trying to understand the difference between ser and openser but standart compliance seems to be very important matter!

Cannot people provide me with some hints? I am sure that I am not the only who is asking the difference between ser and openser. ser documentation does not appear uptodate, but the software as sannounced appears impressive. I have already asked this question but did not receive any answer.

thank you in advance!

rr

----- Original Message ----
From: Christian Schlatter <cs@unc.edu>
To: users@openser.org
Sent: Tuesday, November 7, 2006 10:52:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Users] TM : retransmission timers

Greg Fausak wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I believe this is a well known bug.
> Granularity of timers is 1 second.  So, if you sign up for a timer to
> be fired in 1 second it will happen anywhere between 0 seconds and 1
> second.
> 2 seconds will happen between 1 and 2 seconds.  I usually set up my
> timers to be 2, 2, 4, 8.  There are VOIP providers that are pretty
> sticky about
> the first 500ms.  If you are using one of them you're out of luck.

Yes, there is a timer process that wakes up every second to perform
retransmissions. I was actually quite surprised that OpenSER, which is
known to be very standards compliant, does not follow the RFC 3261
retransmission timeouts. On the other hand, the RFC 3261 timeout values
are just suggestions and standards compliant SIP UA must accept shorter
timeouts. Still it would be nice if OpenSER would support sub second
timers, this would allow for shorter fail-over times.

Christian

>
> I believe SER has made timer changes to support more exact timer
> intervals.  They are a completely different camp, with a different feature
> set (although they share the same roots).
>
> -g
>
>
> On 11/7/06, Jean-François SMIGIELSKI <jf-smig@ibelgique.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I made strange observations about the intervals between
>> retransmissions with the TM module.
>> In my experiments,  I used the default parameters for the TM module
>> timers, and I  sent an INVITE that cannot receive answers (it has a
>> well  known R-URI pattern that is forwarded to a place and port that
>> nobody listen).
>>
>> When reading RFC3261, I expected to see intervals between
>> retransmissions of |500ms|1s|2s|4s|8s|16s|. 7 transmissions, during 32s.
>>
>> But with OpenSER, (I have tested with the debian package 1.1.0-5 on a
>> debian etch, and the cvs sources for 1.1.0 or 1.0.1compiled by
>> myself), I can see intervals like <500ms, 2s, 4s, 4s,4s, ... until 26s
>> are spent (9 sendings). The first interval is sometomes very short
>> (40ms).
>>
>> Altough I like the sequence of 4s separated transmissions, I do not
>> know why the first interval is so short, and why there is no sending
>> after 1s.
>>
>> Did anybody observed such behaviours? Are they normal?
>>
>> Thanks in advance!
>>
>> JF Smigielski.
>>
>>
>> ________________________________________________________________________
>> iBELGIQUE, exprimez-vous !
>> http://web.ibelgique.com/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Users mailing list
>> Users@openser.org
>> http://openser.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/users
>>
>>
>>
>
>

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