[asterisk-ss7] dedicated channel for signaling

[Kristian Nielsen]

marek cervenka <cervajs at fpf.slu.cz> writes:

>> From the start, chan_ss7 was designed for full support of MTP3 failover and
>> fault tolerance. Thus the purpose of implementing clustering was primarily to
>> enable the setup of a system with no single point of failure. So cable
>> failure, host crash, or even a dead network switch will not lead to any
>> downtime (except loosing a few existing calls currently running on affected
>> curcuits).

> it's possible to merge this into digium's libSS7 ? (are you willing to 
> sign disclaimer for digium?)

I do not own the copyright to the code, so it is not possible for me to sign
it over. (The code is GPL, but I understand that to get into libss7, Asterisk
would want full rights to re-license commercially).

But in any case I can't see how the chan_ss7 code could be used in libss7. The
designs are very different. While libss7 is a library that mostly replaces
libisup and reuses the existing chan_zap, chan_ss7 is build as a low-level
ss7-only channel driver.

This means that chan_ss7 has to re-implement all of the non-signalling stuff
(and has probably far fewer such features compared to chan_zap, and more
bugs). But I designed it that way since I felt it was necessary to get full
support for fault tolerance and failover, that would seem difficult to
introduce in just a replacement to libisup in an existing driver without any
clustering support.

But then I never looked in any detail at libss7, so I could be completely wrong.

> chan_ss7 is not developed anymore from your move from sifira to mysql i 
> think

Actually that is not true. Anders and Jacob from Sifira did a great job
continuing the development, for example all of the clustering support was done
after my move. So I know that development has definitely continued. I don't
know what their plans for future releases are though.

But I'm definitely extremely pleased to see all the cool stuff that people are
doing with chan_ss7! I hope it will continue and be successful, and that the
community can continue development as time goes on.

 - Kristian.