[SR-Users] Hello from newbie

[Alex Lake]

That's very useful, thanks. Your guess as to my assumption was 100% correct.
I presume, therefore, that the Kamailio community have no ambitions to 
become more "app"y. To be honest, I can quite sympathise with that.
I will follow up on your other message as soon as I get a chance.
> 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
>