[SR-Users] Hello from newbie

[Alex Balashov]

Hi Alex,

On 02/04/2014 04:52 AM, Alex Lake wrote:

> Just trying to get to grips with Kamailio and thought I'd say hello to
> you all...

Thank you, and welcome to the list and the community!

> Not sure if this is of any interest, but I've found it quite hard to get
> into Kamailio compared to (say) Freeswitch. This is not meant as
> criticism at all, but if you're looking to make it easier, I may be able
> to help!

In all fairness, the comparison to something like Freeswitch is a little 
unwarranted. Kamailio is commonly assumed by newbies to be a finished 
application product, but it's not; it's really something that should be 
regarded more as an SDK or a toolkit than as an off-the-shelf piece of 
OSS VoIP software.

It has a proxy service core, but it doesn't doesn't do anything 
nontrivial out of the box, isn't intended to, and some programming 
ability and reference reading is required to make it do what you want.  :-)

> What I'm trying to do is have a SIP load-balancer such that I can have a
> set of Freeswitch servers that can have traffic routed to them on a
> controlled basis, allowing me to point certain accounts at certain
> servers and take individual servers out of service for upgrade etc.
>
> I think this is SIP server redirection. If there was an example of how
> to do it - eg. what files need to be changed, any database entries, etc.
> that would be most useful. Unfortunately, all my Googling/list searching
> so far has only come up with questions that were either badly worded or
> not answered. Happy to turn anything I come up with into a
> beginner-friendly case-study.

This can be (and elsewhere in the industry, often is) done using 
redirection, but the easier way is probably just to keep Kamailio in 
series--that is, keep the proxy in the signaling path between the caller 
and your Freeswitch servers.  If Kamailio is able to maintain all the 
state, this lends itself easily to use of the 'dispatcher' module:

    http://kamailio.org/docs/modules/4.1.x/modules/dispatcher.html

... which is designed specifically for load-balancing applications.

-- Alex

-- 
Alex Balashov - Principal
Evariste Systems LLC
235 E Ponce de Leon Ave
Suite 106
Decatur, GA 30030
United States
Tel: +1-678-954-0670
Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.alexbalashov.com/