[Asterisk-Users] res_motv: Request for Comment

[Mark Spencer]

I've been considering the nature of Asterisk, its security, the bug
tracker, and more...  And i've come up with an interesting idea: A
"message of the version".  The idea is that Asterisk has a compile time
32-bit unsigned int version which is incremented whenever some major new
bug is fixed.  When Asterisk starts up (and periodically, maybe once per
day), it sends a packet with the version number to a server at Digium,
along with a message level (INFO,MINOR,MAJOR,CRITICAL) and the Digium
server replies (if it receives the packet, if not, it might get sent again
in a day) with any INFO, MINOR, MAJOR, or CRITICAL messages which are
associated with that version of the code.  In this way, an asterisk
administrator could easily see if there were any major issues, critical
security updates, etc, that his system might need to be updated for.

Now, of course, any time you put a "call home" feature in, there are
people who will be concerned about privacy.  Clearly it will be able to be
disabled, but I want to run my idea about deployment by everyone here and
see if you guys had some ideas.  The idea would be that *new* installs
("make samples") would have the feature turned on for MAJOR level by
default, and that any existing install (e.g. /etc/asterisk/sip.conf
exists, but not /etc/asterisk/motv.conf) would have the file created at
the next "make install" based upon prompting the installer.

Any feedback on:

a) The idea itself -- is it a good one or is it stupid?

b) The way to make it deployed without sneaking a "call home" in on
anybody that doesn't want it?

Thanks!

Mark