Olle E. Johansson
2004-May-23 05:22 UTC
[Asterisk-Users] *** Asterisk Sunday News: Conferences on the phone and IRL - "in real life"
Here in Sweden, it's supposed to be springtime. A wonderful time of the year, with sunny skies and wonderful weather. Almost summer. Today, it's not. It's winter all over again with rain and only 3 degrees celsius outside. Better to stay inside and write a weekly Asterisk newsletter :-) This week's topics: ------------------- * Looking beyond Asterisk 1.0/1.1 - what's up? * Asterisk on SlashDot * Asterisk on the O'Reilly Open Source Convention * Writing community documentation - asteriskdocs.org * Application of the week: The MeetMe conference system * Alternatives to the standard MeetMe *** Looking beyond Asterisk 1.0/1.1 - what's up? ------------------------------------------------- At Astricon in September we'll arrange a developer's meeting. This is the first time we gather all Asterisk programmers and documentation writers into a meeting that will be held a the third day of Astricon. The idea is to be able to discuss future architectures and major additions. The Digium team, with Mark Spencer in the lead, will be an active part of othis meeting. There are several ways to set up a meeting like this, from totally uncontrolled chaos to organized semi-controlled chaos. We're aiming for the latter. Read more on how you can contribute: - http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2004-May/046858.html - http://www.astricon.net *** Asterisk on SlashDot ------------------------ Asterisk was mentioned on SlashDot this week, together with e164.org, an ENUM-like registry created by very active Asterisk contributors. In fact, we've added an e164.org-specific app to Asterisk in cvs head. Read more: - http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/22/1840220 - http://www.e164.org - http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=ENUM *** Asterisk on the O'Reilly Open Source Convention --------------------------------------------------- John Todd, an active member of the Asterisk community, is talking about Asterisk on the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon, in July: "This talk details how to insert Asterisk into your organization in ways that that won't cost any significant money, yet will impress senior management with only a few clever tricks to the end goal of your receiving funding for a full-blown beta test. The savings that can be realized from using Asterisk are truly astounding, and the features available at no cost are one of the best examples of tangible cost savings that open source can provide." * http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2004/view/e_sess/5016 *** Writing community documentation - asteriskdocs.org ------------------------------------------------------ Maybe we should produce a couple of Asterisk OpenOffice Impress presentations that we all can use on local Open Source community gatherings? I'll hand that idea over to the Asterisk Docs project. On the topic of docs, they have restarted and are having regular MeetMe phone conferences. They need your help, we need more people writing documentation, making sure we're not adding functions without proper documentation, explaining to new users how great Asterisk really is behind all the code and cryptic commands. The Asterisk Docs project is awarded my "Asterisk project of the week" award. They have the worst web site, but is a great project to join. (Yes, I've seen the new web layout suggestions, they're great :-) - http://www.asteriskdocs.org - Mailing list and IRC channel is available *** Application of the week: The MeetMe conference system --------------------------------------------------------- Have you discovered the not-so-simple-anymore "Simple Meetme Conference Bridge" application? It's a killer app in Asterisk. With this app, you get a lot of functionality: - Multiuser conferencing over multiple channels - VoIP and PSTN - Announcements: One talker, multiple listeners - Administration - kicking users, muting and locking conferences - Background music while waiting for other participants - Statically configured conferences with pin code auth for entry - Dynamic conferences, created on demand (the conference number is told at first user entry) In CVS head, there's been a number of additions to MeetMe lately, additions that make MeetMe much more than a "simple" conference bridge. The dial plan applications for the MeetMe system in CVS head are - MeetMe - enter a conference (in some cases creates a dynamic conference) - MeetMeAdmin - kick users, lock conferences, mute conferences - MeetMeCount - count number of participants for a conference There's also a new family of CLI commands for managing MeetMe: - Meetme List conferences - MeetMe kick <confno> <user> Kick a user out of a conference - MeetMe kick <confno> all Kick all users - MeetMe list <confno> List participants in a conference - MeetMe lock <confno> Lock a conference - no more users - MeetMe unlock <confno> Unlock a conference - MeetMe mute <confno> Mute a conference - MeetMe unmute <confno> Unmute a conference Some additional notes on Meetme conferences - The conference bridge runs Ulaw codec by default If you let people connect with GSM or other codecs, Asterisk will use CPU power to convert audio between codecs - The variable MEETMESECS contains the amount of seconds user was in conference - The Meetme app reads meetme.conf for each static conference joined I.e. there's no need to reload the config for each change - Authenticate with the authenticate() app if you want a user basaed auth for a meetme conference - You can limit the number of participants by using meetmecount() and variables in the dial plan - To be able to run MeetMe, your Asterisk server needs a Zaptel timer. This is provided from Digium cards or through various drivers. See http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk%20timer *** Alternatives to the standard MeetMe --------------------------------------- A variant of MeetMe with a web based control UI is MeetMe2 "The goals of this application is to control your audience/users in the conference room. That will allow you to have a visual presentation and to control the conferences over the net. A lot of changes has be made to app_meetme to keep some conferences informations into a DB and to check through if some properties has been changed." - http://www.areski.net/asterisk-meetme/about.php?s=0 Another variant is app_conference, that according to the author, can handle more simultaneous users: "If people are looking for a higher-capacity conferencing application, take a look at app_conference, in the iaxclient (on sourceforge) CVS. I haven't really benchmarked meetme, but I _think_ that app_conference might be able to beat it. Certainly in it's designed application it will (iax clients which use VAD on the client side)." - http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/iaxclient/app_conference/ *** Useful Asterisk web links: ------------------------------ * Asterisk: http://www.asterisk.org * Asterisk mailing lists: http://lists.digium.com (users, dev, biz and cvs mailing list) * Asterisk bug tracker: http://bugs.digium.com * Asterisk IRC channel: #asterisk on irc.freenode.net * Digium: http://www.digium.com * Wiki: http://www.voip-info.org * Voip Search: http://search.voip-forum.com * Astricon: http://www.astricon.net That was all for this week. I hope that the spring will try again up here in the Nordics. If not, you'll find me on the IRC while hacking. Otherwise, I'll be out in the garden with a wireless Asterisk phone connected to my small Asterisk Linux server running silently on compact flash... More on that topic another week. And if you have topics for me to include in Asterisk Sunday News, mail me off list :-) Have a nice Asterisk week! /Olle
Leif Madsen
2004-May-23 11:40 UTC
[Asterisk-Users] *** Asterisk Sunday News: Conferences on the phone and IRL - "in real life"
> -----Original Message----- > From: asterisk-users-admin@lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-users- > admin@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Olle E. Johansson > Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2004 8:23 AM > To: Users Asterisk > Subject: [Asterisk-Users] *** Asterisk Sunday News: Conferences on the > phone and IRL - "in real life" > > > *** Writing community documentation - asteriskdocs.org > ------------------------------------------------------ > Maybe we should produce a couple of Asterisk OpenOffice Impress > presentations that we all can use on local Open Source community > gatherings? I'll hand that idea over to the Asterisk Docs project. > On the topic of docs, they have restarted and are having regular MeetMe > phone conferences. They need your help, we need more people writing > documentation, making sure we're not adding functions without > proper documentation, explaining to new users how great > Asterisk really is behind all the code and cryptic commands. > > The Asterisk Docs project is awarded my "Asterisk project of the week" > award. They have the worst web site, but is a great project to join. > (Yes, I've seen the new web layout suggestions, they're great :-) > > - http://www.asteriskdocs.org > - Mailing list and IRC channel is availableJust wanted to make a quick comment about the asterisk docs project. Work seems to starting to progress forward, but we are desperately in need of people to help document, especially the more advanced sections of Asterisk. I'll try not to go into too much depth here. We are currently trying to focus on the direction of book and what our ultimate goals are, plus getting a better idea about how to write documentation. Jared has done a fantastic job starting to outline chapter 4 of the book (which we feel at this point is the most important starting point for anyone starting with Asterisk). After a hiatus of approximately 4 months (I was back in a very dense course curriculum so I was unable to do much work on the book) we are active again. Please join us in #asterisk-doc to discuss any sections you wish to work on, or join the mailing list and participate. It's not nearly the same volume of traffic as asterisk-users, so if you are on this list, might as well just join asterisk-docs as well! :) On the note regarding the new website, sypher has developed us a fantastic layout that jsmith and his wife are working on putting together. Exomorph is working on putting together the CMS for us, so I figure within' the next week or so http://www.asteriskdocs.org should have a new look and feel allowing us to update content much my dynamically. For now, I will be attempting to spend some time on writing docs. Maybe some people can join us! This Tuesday we have a tentative conference/discussion session setup to talk about what we have been working on for the week. Thanks for letting me use some your bandwidth, Leif Madsen aka blitzrage.