[Asterisk-Users] New Asterisk bounty: SIP simultaneous

[Sunrise Ltd]

Olle E. Johansson wrote:

>Well, I have users that get an account on my PBX.
>
>I really don't care how many phones they want to use,
>hardware phones on their desktop or soft phones on their
>laptop while travelling. It's still a user with one
account.

Two words: self provisioning.

>Asterisk doesn't really bother with *users*, it has a
>device-centric view of life, universe and propably
everything.

That's only partly correct. The queue management system
has a user view, called agents, and agents can
authenticate themselves independently from the device they
are using and then attach themselves to call queues
managed by Asterisk.

However, for anything unrelated to queue management, you
are correct in that Asterisk doesn't apply this concept
there.

I may even agree with you that it would be worthwhile to
apply this user concept to other areas outside of queue
management.

Still I disagree that parallel forking is the way to do
this. I even disagree that it would introduce a user view.
Instead it would water down the device view. So you go
from an system with a very clean device view but without a
universally applied user view to a system with a messy
device view and still no user view.

>With Asterisk, the user has to call me each time he wants
a new
>device connected and I have to reconfigure his setup.

Not if you give them a means to provision it themselves.
This can be as easy as an extension that asks for a PIN
number and then executes a shell script.

If I had support for multiple registrations on one [peer]
account, the
[peer] would become a user account instead of a device

Well, that's an opinion.

I'd rather prefer to have a user layer on top and in
addition to a device layer instead of trading one for the
other.

This is how GSM works BTW, you have the IMEI which
identifies the device and the IMSI which identifies the
subscriber. A subscriber may be using the same IMSI on
different devices, but the IMEI for each device is unique.
The IMEI lives in the device. The IMSI lives on the SIM
card.

The customer care and billing system is mostly concerned
about the IMSI when dealing with a subscriber, but some
low level network elements need the IMEI to do their job.
The conclusion here is that there is a use for both,
device and user views.

I think it would be wise to take a lesson from GSM in
respect of having both a device and a user view, and not
just trade one for the other.

>And the user could add as many devices as he wanted
>(up to a defined limit) without bothering the
administrator.

Early mobile phone systems made the same mistake you are
proposing here. They too said "device = user" and it
opened the door to plenty of problems, from inconvenience
when changing a device to fraud.

The introduction of GSM introduced a user layer on top of
the device layer and you got both convenience (ie move the
SIM card to another phone and secondary SIM for a family
member etc etc) and better security (no device cloning,
stolen equipment can be blocked through EIR network
elements etc etc).


>I guess that's why a lot of people ask for this function.

No, people asking for this because "If all you have is a
hammer, everything looks like a nail."

>However, since Asterisk doesn't really bother with a user
concept,
>we really have to teach Asterisk about users. And user
groups.

I agree with that in priniciple, but parallel forking
doesn't do that.

>I've been discussing this many times, and so has many
other
>people. I think we need an elegant way of defining users
to
>asterisk so we connect peers, users, agents and mailboxes
>to a *user* with one set of credentials. If you look into
your
>Asterisk configuration, you will find that there are
users and
>credentials for logging in everywhere. It's not easy to
>maintain at all.

Agreed again, but still fail to see how parallel forking
would contribute anything to what you ask for here.

>Hint: I have a new idea for a solution on multiple reg's.
>Raise the bounty and I might give it a try. ;-)

If you absolutely have to mess with it, just make sure it
can be disabled by the rest of us who don't want to deal
with any potential problems it may introduce.

rgds
benjk

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