[SR-Users] Simulating kamailio config flows

[Andreas Granig]

Hi,

I'd like to put a topic up for discussion to test kamailio config logics.

The standard way of doing so is to start kamailio as usual and write 
sipp or sipsak scenarios to perform automated tests. This can get quite 
complex pretty quickly, as you always have to take care of covering the 
full transaction on the client side, where in most of the cases you 
really just want to know which IP/port kamailio would send the message 
to, and how some headers look like after processing. Also, it doesn't 
really allow to inspect your variables and avps etc. on the fly other 
than logging them to syslog and parsing it from there.

Let me know if this is stupid and/or a complete overkill, but what about 
introducing some kind of dummy mode, where you'd pipe a message into 
kamailio via stdin, and get the resulting message out on stdout (e.g. in 
ngrep style with ip information as first line, plus the content 
following), plus a dump of internals (e.g. vars, avps) on stderr as 
they're being assigned, and once the message is processed, kamailio 
would just shut down again?

There are quite some things to consider, like not doing any timer 
handling in tm, but would this be something anyone would be interesting 
to discuss in more detail?

If I'm completely on a wrong track, what are suggested alternatives to 
testing full sip call flows other than running automated UAs against 
kamailio?

Andreas