[Asterisk-Users] *** Asterisk Sunday (hrrm) News: Moving ahead at CVS Warp 5
Olle E. Johansson
oej at edvina.net
Mon Jul 5 05:12:26 MST 2004
Sunday news is today published on a monday. Yesterday was fourth of
july, and I used that as an excuse for being off line yesterday.
(Sweden's national day is June 6th - and it's not yet a public holiday,
btw). Most of my Asterisk time lately have been used for producing
the registration site for Astricon and tracking down speakers that
haven't sent in their material for the conference web. Meanwhile,
developer's have been struggling hard to expand Asterisk to new
territories and improve existing functions.
During the summer, I can't guarantee weekly publishing of
Asterisk Sunday News. The weather is so unstable here in the
Stockholm area, so I'll use rainy days for Asterisk works
and stay off-line to go kite-flying, bathing or maybe canoing
when the weather permits... Thank heaven for Asterisk's voicemail
and call forwarding. If it rains on Öland, but not here, I'll
immediately forward all my calls to my collegue down there
and run out of the office to enjoy the summer. Voicemail
and call queue logic have changed quite a lot lately, so
read on to make sure you have the latest Asterisk news:
Today's topics:
* Astricon Open for Registration
* Major changes to call queueing in Asterisk
* New book: "Asterisk for a Small Office Setup"
* Redfone announces Asterisk-based commercial PBX
* New version of FireFly - the IAX and SIP softphone
* Recent CVS additions and changes
* The bug process revisited
*** Astricon Opens for Registration
-----------------------------------
Astricon is the first Asterisk user's and developer's conference,
to be held in september at the Atlanta Marriot Century Center,
Georgia, US.
A number of speakers are coming to Atlanta to tell you more about
how they implement and use Asterisk. A number of in-depth tutorials
bring both the newbie and expert up to speed, a line of professional
Asterisk user's are gearing up to participate as speakers in
the conference as well as a number of sponsors that are going to
exhibit the latest Asterisk-compatible products and services in the
Asterisk Expo.
Registration opens today. If you register early, before the end
of july, you'll get a 20% discount. Please help us with early
registrations so we can estimate the number of attendees!
If you are a sponsor and wants to be part of this first Asterisk
Conference and Expo, mail info at astricon.net today.
* http://www.astricon.net
*** Major changes to call queueing in Asterisk
----------------------------------------------
Since my last newsletter, options for penalty, wrapuptime and priority have
been added to the Asterisk queue system. Priority works like this,
according to the contributor:
The new addition provides the ability to operate queues as priority queues
in addition to the current FIFO mode. This gives the ability to queue a call
not at the end of the queue but anywhere in the queue, according to the call's
priority.
Now you can have just one queue servicing all the calls (more important and
less important) with the right order. The priority of a call entering a
queue is determined by a special channel variable, QUEUE_PRIO.
Higher values of this variable mean higher priority. By not setting this variable,
all calls have the same priority, 0, by default (FIFO). E.g.
; Important clients
exten => 111,1,Playback(welcome)
exten => 111,2,SetVar(QUEUE_PRIO=10)
exten => 111,3,Queue(support)
; Less important clients
exten => 112,1,Playback(welcome)
exten => 112,2,SetVar(QUEUE_PRIO=5)
exten => 112,3,Queue(support)
* See http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk%20cmd%20queue
* and http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+call+queues
The patches for priority-based queueing was provided by Inaccess Networks.
*** New Book: "Asterisk for Small Office Setup"
-----------------------------------------------
Dan Cole has published a new Asterisk book. There are rumours about
another Asterisk book being in the pipelines as well.
In this book I explain the setup of Asterisk, provide information about
Asterisk and Voice Over IP Service, as well as advanced configuration.
The book also explains some of the common problems with Asterisk
and how to resolve them.
* http://www.saww.net/asterisk/
*** Redfone announces Asterisk-based commercial PBX
---------------------------------------------------
Redfone, based in Miami, USA, announces a commercial PBX based on Asterisk.
I've never seen this company acting with contributions to the Asterisk Open Source
community. Would be another feather in their hat if they participated and gave back...
"Our new ECS runs on the highly reliable Linux operating system and is
based on the Asterisk PBX software application. Both are from the
open-source environment. Asterisk is a proven IP-PBX product operating
in hundreds of organizations worldwide, from small 'mom-and-pop' installations
to organizations with several thousand users," notes Mr. Lynn. "Use of Asterisk
and hardware components that comply with open standards ensures a cost- effective
solution and a wider choice of telephone and computer equipment for customers,"
he said.
* http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040607/flm032_1.html
*** New version of FireFly - the IAX and SIP softphone
------------------------------------------------------
There's a new firefly release out for those who are using firefly
with your lovely Asterisk / SIP server. The main changes are improved GUI fixes
(mouse wheel works now ), few url parsing fixes, mic volume control and improved
compatibility with SIP servers (namely SER).
* http://www.virbiage.com/firefly/download/firefly-thirdparty.exe
*** Recent CVS Source code Additions
-------------------------------------
Here's a number of additions done to Asterisk CVS head since last newsletter:
GENERAL/MISC
* Backslash-quoting of special characters in config files, like \\ and \'
* Support for extended regular expressions in the dial plan
APPLICATIONS
* New option 'f' for forcing caller ID in dial()
* Penalty, wrapuptime and priority support for queueing
* dial() now sets ${DIALSTATUS} to reflect status of unsuccessful connection
* Meetme now has option "w" for waiting for marked user before conference starts
(chairman, teacher)
* Support for leaving voicemail in multiple mailboxes simultaneously
* Support for automaticaclly deleting voicemail after message have
been sent as e-mail
* Voicemail internationalization support
* A number of improvements to the Radio Repeater application
CHANNELS
* Swedish indications for zaptel interfaces
* Fixes for overlap dialing over PRI (Dialtone)
* NOTIFY support in PRI interface (Zaptel)
* PRI subaddress and NSF support
* chan_sip: Support for RFC 3581 in(rport= headers)
* Remote Party ID header support for chan_sip
* Promiscuous redirect option in chan_sip
* A number of changes to the ISDN4Linux support, including improved DTMF support
* IAX2 jitter buffer enhancements
* Support for SIP [user]s stored in MYSQL
* Support for Open Settlement Protocol in Chan_sip
* zaptel: Add support for international impedence matching (improves echo abroad!)
* -R option to Asterisk for automatically reconnecting to Asterisk daemon if
connection is broken
* Improved support for Linux ALSA sound system
* Do-not-disturb status on ZAP channels through manager API
* Ztdummy no longer needs USB interface for timing in Linux kernel > 2.6
* Inband progress notification for zap and SIP channels
PORTABILITY
* A number of fixes for 64-bit processors
* Many fixes for *BSD ans OS/X support
NEW APPLICATIONS
* Alarmreceiver: Central Station Alarm receiver for Ademco Contact ID
* Userevent: Sends admin-defined events to manager API
* Progress: Request that the channel indicate in-band progress
is available to the user.
* SetAMAflags(): Set the channel AMA Flags for billing
Upgrade your Asterisk now and test all these new functions!
* http://www.asterisk.org/index.php?menu=download
Please help us update the Asterisk Wiki and the Asterisk documentation
to cover all these new functions!
* Wiki: http://www.voip-info.org
* Asterisk documentation project: http://www.asteriskdocs.org
*** The bug process revisited
------------------------------
During the week, I sent out a call for help on the asterisk-dev list.
We have a steady flow of bug reports coming in to the bug tracker. These
are meant as reports to the community, they are not directed towards Mark
Spencer. So as a community, we need to be better in handling these.
There are a number of bug marshals appointed. The role of the bug marshal
is not to solve the bug, fixing the code. The role is to assist in moving
the bug report towards some sort of resolution. We need more programmers
that help us marshals to test and fix bugs.
By now, there's quite a lot of companies building products and services
around Asterisk. Not all of them are seen on the mailing list or on the
bug tracker. I would very much like to see more of them dedicating
resources towards the bug tracker, contributing back to the community.
I now of one company that has dedicated part of an employee's time to
do that, but we need more good examples of for-profit Asterisk companies
acting as good members of the community.
This doesn't mean that you should not report your bug. It's very important
that you report bugs and contribute with patches for new functions.
We just need more people participating in the process at bugs.digium.com,
handling issues and helping Asterisk to move forward.
Please join the forces now!
* http://bugs.digium.com
*** 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: http://www.astricon.net
* Asterisk documentation project: http://www.asteriskdocs.org
As you see from the CVS changes list, the speed of this project is
extremely high. We're flying forward on CFS warp speed 5 with
captain Spencer in control. Even though Mark was travelling to Europe,
he submitted patches to CVS from the airport and possibly also
from the hotel.
For the rest of you, this is not a recommendation. Take some time
off, let voicemail kick in and enjoy the summer! But don't forget
to register for Astricon before leaving the office!
Have a nice Asterisk week!
/Olle
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