[SR-Users] home pbx server experience

u ueberwachungsstaat at googlemail.com
Tue May 14 16:27:06 CEST 2013


I would like to share my experience with kamailio and other home pbx servers.

Kamailio on my kirkwood home router for my 6 SIP users is perhaps
overkill: I don't really need mysql and "scalability". But at last I
finally managed to make calling between registered users work stable.
My voip clients only work in all NAT scenarios if I work around some
bugs: to use csipsimple on android I had to change rtpproxy_manage()
to rtpproxy_manage("c") in kamailio's default config, so that problems
with conflicting c: entries in the SDP go away.

I propose kamailio could ship with a special example
kamailio-compatible.cfg that doesn't try to be RFC compliant, but
compatible to the most common voip clients. Right now the only thing I
would change for this is the option for rtpproxy_manage, but I'm sure
others will know more common quirks that could safely be enabled to
increase compatibility. I think this compatibility idea is what yate
sticks to for their defaults. In freeswitch you also have to do it all
manually, and it's much more work to figure things out in their
enormous config files.

The other SIP proxies I had tried before kamailio officially fit all
my requirements, including support for multihomed dynamic IPs, but
contrary to their claims it didn't work.
Yate was easy to set up, but the default dialplan is more confusing
than powerful and after having made everything work I realised yate
was clogging my CPU and RAM and after some time always randomly
stopped working. This is with only 2 users connected! It also wasn't
possible to fix NAT sdp while leaving the codecs section in the SDP
alone at the same time. I tried to debug the code, but the C++ was so
complex that I had to give up.
Freeswitch was much more difficult to setup, a multihomed setup with
dynamic IP was super buggy and it also didn't help that the
unintuitive configuration is all in complex unreadable XML
configuration files.

Kamailio and rtpproxy don't officially support dynamic IP address, but
I can just restart both each time my DSL provider forces me to a new
IP address. This happens automatically in the night and is no big
hassle really. The most simple, least-featureful solution works best
it seems.

Now the last problem I have with kamailio: I don't know how to connect
my accounts to my sip providers (i.e. Sipgate, Betamax, Dellmont).
I would like a simple way to do this, preferably without other
features that always seem to complicate the matters. Is there
something more lightweight and simple than asterisk, freeswitch and
yate, that people use successfully for this task together with
kamailio and rtpproxy?

u



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