asterisk users - Jul 2004 - *** Asterisk Sun/Monday News: Time to download, Scotty!

This week starts with the exciting news: We're getting close to
Asterisk 1.0 again. After the failed attempt earlier this year,
we've been able to remove a lot of the MAJOR/CRASH bugs from the
bug tracker and Mark feel's it's time to target 1.0 again.

At this point, the community needs to work as a community,
spending extra time on finding bugs, solving issues, improving
documentation and making Asterisk more stable. There has been
extensive code reviews, but the more eyes that go through the
source, the better. Telephony requires stability.

Join the effort, regardless if you are a user,
administrator, coder or documentation writer!
Consider this: You're drafted! :-)

This week's topics:
-------------------
* Asterisk 1.0: Second try
* Astricon 2004: Early bird discount only applies in July
* Changes in the #asterisk IRC channel - Registration required
* Asterisk Developer of the week
* Asterisk GUI of the week
* Using Call parking with CVS head? Rename the config file!
* Sunday News Re-run: Read the configs, Luke (even if you're an Asterisk
guru)
* Chan_sip2: Now updated
* Recent CVS changes
* Reporting bugs in the bug tracker


*** Asterisk 1.0: Second try
----------------------------
Last Saturday Mark Spencer released Asterisk 1.0 rc1. This is the first
release candidate for Asterisk 1.0. A release candidate is software that
needs extensive testing and a community that reports all bugs.

I would like to send a *huge* THANK YOU to Mark from the Asterisk
community. Mark has been working like a maniac to reach this point.
The bug tracker has been rolling and rocking around with messages
from Mark and patches have been produced and integrated at an incredible speed.

During the weekend, the bug marshals decided to mark a lot of patches in
the bug tracker "post 1.0". Fixes will still be added, but we are
trying
to hold off all additional features for a while. We need to stabilize
the 1.0 code, and one way to do that is to freeze the code and try to
limit changes to bug fixes.

There are a few unsolved major issues in the RC1. These are worked on
and hopefully they will soon be resolved.

The old "stable" CVS tree and distributions are no longer valid. The
"stable" version is no longer supported. There's only one active
CVS,
the "HEAD" tree, and it's now the path forward to 1.0. Hopefully,
we'll be able to branch into a "stable" and
"development" CVS tree
later on, after the 1.0 release.

As always, this depends on if we can find a working solution for
managing and maintaining the stable CVS tree. Most developers have
a tendency of moving forward instead of maintaining stability and
fixing bugs. However, a "stable" version is a much requested
feature from many companies using Asterisk in a production environment.

You can download Asterisk 1.0rc1 from several servers. There are also
RPMs for the major Linux distributions.

* Download mirrors: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk-mirrors
* RPMs: ftp://ftp.nacs.net/asterisk

To get better documentation for 1.0, join the asterisk-docs mailing list
and contribute to the effort. Leif Madsen and Jared Smith really
needs your help in order to get a decent handbook out to 1.0 release.

* http://www.asteriskdocs.org


*** Astricon 2004: Early bird discount only applies in July
-----------------------------------------------------------
Astricon 2004 is getting closer. This is the first Asterisk user's and
developer's conference. During July, you will get an early-bird
discount on the registration fee so please do not forget to register
early.

Registering early also helps us planning. The more users, the bigger
chance that a sponsor will decide to sponsor an Asterisk party :-)

You may register for one, two or three days with or without hotel
room booking at the web site.

* http://www.astricon.net

*** Changes in the #asterisk IRC channel - Registration required
----------------------------------------------------------------

Due to abuse of the #asterisk IRC channel, the channel now requires
that you are registred with FreeNode to be able to participate.
Please "/msg NickServ help register" in your IRC client to learn how
to
register your nickname and get access to #asterisk.

 From the Freenode FAQ:
"Why should I register my nick? Your nick is how people on freenode
know you. If you register it, you'll be able to use the same nick over
and over. If you don't register, someone else may end up registering
the nick you want. If you register and use the same nick, people will
begin to know you by reputation. If they're running IRC software which
supports CAPAB IDENTIFY-MSG, they'll be able to tell when someone
is spoofing your identity.

If a channel is set to mode +r, you won't be able to join it unless
you are registered and identified to NickServ. If you try to join,
you might be forwarded to a different channel. If a channel is set to
mode +R, you won't be able to speak while on that channel unless you
are registered and identified. Both of these modes are used to reduce
channel harassment by DoS kiddies."

Digium is a sponsor of FreeNode.

* Instructions for how to register your nickname:
   http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#nicksetup

*** Developer of the week: Rob Gagnon
-------------------------------------
The Asterisk-developer-of-the-week-award is awarded to Rob Gagnon, for a
series of patches to the Asterisk source. Rob has been going through
all of the source code looking for memory leaks, buffer overflows and
other issues that are hard to find. This is much needed work,
but not very fun to do. Rob is an active Asterisk developer, also
one of the active programmers in the ast_data project.

*** Asterisk GUI of the week: Asternic
--------------------------------------
There are many GUI interfaces to Asterisk, doing different things.
One of these that have a continous development is Asternic, developed
by Nicol?s Gudi?o.

   "Flash Operator Panel is a switchboard type application for the
    Asterisk PBX. It runs on a web browser with the flash plugin.
    It is able to display information about your PBX activity in real
    time. The layout is configurable (button sizes and colors, icons,
    etc). You can have more than 100 buttons active per screen. On the
    Live Demo there are 28 buttons defined.
    It also supports contexts: you can have one server running and
    many different client displays (for hosted PBX, different departments,
    etc). It can integrate with CRM software, by poping up a web page
    (and passing the CLID) when a specified button is ringing."

Asternic is simple to install and consists of a perl script server
that communicates with Asterisk through the manager API and a Flash
application for the web browser. Give your Asterisk a face-lift,
install Asternic today!

* Asternic: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+Flash+Operator+Panel
* Home page: http://www.asternic.org


*** Using Call parking with CVS head? Rename the config file!
-------------------------------------------------------------
Recently, the file "parking.conf" was renamed
"features.conf" in
order to be a more general config file for various Asterisk
options that needs to be configured, but doesn't really belong
in any other config file.

The parking source code files was also renamed to be the container
of future small functions that need a home. In some installations
you need to clean the source tree after CVS updates to compile.
Remove the ".depend" files in all source directories and recompile.
If not, your Make will complain that "parking.h" doesn't exist
any more.

*** Sunday News Re-run: Read the configs, Luke!
-----------------------------------------------
For those of you that have a working installation that you keep using,
this is a reminder to check into the configs/ directory of the Asterisk
source tree, regardless if you downloaded a tar ball or from CVS.

As we add or change features in Asterisk, the sample config files are
updated. If you look there, you might get new insights into how to solve
your problems. Also, you might find new features that you really need.

If you have a new installation "gmake samples" or "make
samples" will
install these files for you.

In CVS head, the development source tree, we've added quite a lot
of information recently to these files. They are now more educational
and contains a lot of sample configurations.

*** Chan_sip2: Now updated
--------------------------
The chan_sip2 SIP channel is now updated to work with the latest CVS.
The new version, labelled Z - or Zacharias - includes a couple of small
changes in regards to earlier versions and a number of differences
in regards to the standard SIP channel in Asterisk:

* SIP realm authentication
* Additional manager events
* Improved DNS SRV support
* SIP Digest Authentication based on digest user, not From: name
* Templates for easier configuration of multiple devices
* Mysql Authentication support
* Support for Symmetric RTP
* New applications: sipgetheader() and sipaddheader()

The idea with the chan_sip2 project is to have a testing ground before
new features are introduced in the ordinary chan_sip. A lot of features
have been ported from chan_sip2 to chan_sip in CVS. In order to continue
to do so, I need more feedback on the features I add. Add your comments to
the bug tracker, find me on IRC (Nick: oej) or send me e-mail.

* Chan_sip2 source: http://bugs.digium.com/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=0000759

*** Recent CVS changes
----------------------
Here's a number of additions done to Asterisk CVS head since last
newsletter:

GENERAL/MISC
* Quite a lot of source code cleanups by Rob Gagnon
* CDR: Store CDR records in a SQLite database.
* CDR/mysql: Fix start time in cdr_mysql
* Manager API: New support for an event mask to be sent on a
   manager login session
* Manager API: Improved support for events for parked calls
* A lot of cleanups of the ODBC source code
* DSP.c: attempt to warn users doing inband DTMFon compressed codecs
* Agi: restructure AGI source code to eventually support dynamic
   application registration
* Musiconhold: Support for custom commands (as alternative to mpg123)
* Parking: Rename "parking.conf" to "features.conf"

APPLICATIONS
* Dial: Make ringing clearer
* Dial: Publish DIALEDTIME and ANSWEREDTIME variables after the call
* Voicemail: Rename option "emailtitle" to "emailsubject"
* Voicemail: Add "nextaftercmd" option to voicemail to move to the
   next message automatically
* Voicemail: change to flow of voicemail login when password is bad
* pbx: Give Busy() and Congestion() an optional timeout
* GroupCount: Allow multiple groups per channel (group categories)

CHANNELS
* chan_iax2: Add IAX provisioning support to Asterisk
* chan_iax2: Change IAX2 channel naming convention
* chan_sip: When doing rport, remove the ";rport" before adding
";rport=5060"
* chan_sip/rtp: Extend sip.conf bindaddr to RTP connections on SIP
* chan_sip: Add support for SIP parking
* chan_sip: Improvements to "SIP SHOW HISTORY"
* chan_sip: A number of signalling improvements
* chan_sip: Build contact without @ sign if there is no extension

PORTABILITY
* libpri: q921: Don't process subchannels by default
* chan_zap: Fix native zap bridging with GR-303
* chan_zap: Implement confirmation for PRI
* chan_mgcp: Re-listen after MGCP reload
* chan_zap: Add udev support
* chan_zap: new option to zaptel.conf, prilocaldialplan. This is used
   only for setting the caller number's PRI dial plan.
* chan_h323: implement the setting of noFastStart and noH245Tunneling.

NEW APPLICATIONS
- none-

Upgrade your Asterisk now and test all these new functions!
* http://www.asterisk.org/index.php?menu=download

*** Reporting bugs in the bug tracker
-------------------------------------
Before you report bugs in the bug tracker, you have to read
the instructions, you need to read the bug tracker introduction and
follow it. If not, you will waste the bug marshals time and slow
down processing of your bug report, since we have to ask you these
questions - that you should answer by default:

  "The following information is necessary for you to submit a bug
   properly in a manner that will get it repaired in the shortest possible time:

    1. CVS version ("show version") - if this is not the most
       updated CVS, why not? Have you tried it?
    2. What operating system and distribution of software are you running?
       What version? ("Linux Redhat 9.0" as an example.)
    3. Is the problem reliably repeatable? If not, you'll need to be
       EXTREMELY detailed in giving your configuration notes and including
       as much debug information as you possibly can, as non-repeatable
       problems tend to be almost impossible to guess resolution types.
    4. See the notes below on "valgrind" and "gdb"
    5. Include all your outputs from various traces, debugging, etc, as
       attachments and NOT as pasted text in the bug report. The bugtracker
       does funky things with line wrapping, etc. and an attached file
       makes more sense.
    6. MAKE SURE THE BUG DOESN'T EXIST ALREADY. Please be diligent in
reading all
       of the possibly relevant bugs. This may take some time, but duplication
is a
       real pain.
       Plus, in reading the other bugs you might find something useful. :-)
"

We repeatedly see large pieces of debug pasted into the bug report, instead of
being attached as an attachment. Bug reports without operating system and
distribution
is common, as well as forgetting to answer which Asterisk version this report
applies
to.

We need bug reports and now, when aiming for a 1.0 release, we need well
prepared
and easy-to-handle bug reports in order to move forward without having to wait
for
answers of these questions. Thank you for your assistance!

* Read the full instructions now:
   http://www.digium.com/bugtracker.html

*** Useful Asterisk web links:
------------------------------
* Asterisk: http://www.asterisk.org
* Asterisk mailing lists: http://lists.digium.com
   (users, bsd, 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 2004: http://www.astricon.net
* Asterisk documentation project: http://www.asteriskdocs.org

*** Epilogue: The pressure is on
--------------------------------
Today, at the same moment as I connected to the IRC channel, two
people independently asked me for yesterdays issue of the
Asterisk Sunday News. I've tried saying in several issues that
publishing Sunday News will be irregular and on a randomly picked
rainy day during the summer. However, it's good that people want
more information, more documentation and more features. I like
it.

One feature I would like this summer is "more summer feeling!".
The weather gods haven't been kind to my part of Sweden so far.
On the other hand, I've gotten a lot of time to read books.
Yes, I'm one of the " the Da Vinci Code" readers. Too bad I read
it while leaving England, so I missed the missing orb in
Sir Isaac Newton's tomb. If you like thrillers, read it.
And let's hope that this second try at reaching Asterisk 1.0
doesn't turn out to be a thriller, but a smooth process
leading forward to opening a new CVS branch for additional
features, paving the way towards 1.1 and future releases.

Have a great Asterisk Week!

/Olle