[Asterisk-Users] Conference solution for 100+ users

[Sergio Veltri]

Stefan,

Thanks for your feedback. I am testing everything to find the right
solution. It is an interesting project since the listeners will vary
everytime. Most of them are corporate users and thus unable to touch
the corporate FW.

I found a large international corporation that allows me to run tests
from within their networks but without touching the FW. So that is
good. So far none of the iax2 clients worked. The only thing that
works is Skype and the MSN only for internal voice. They cant use MSN
to speak with other MSN users outside their network. So I assume they
either opened the Skype ports or Skype just happened to work.

I will start playing with streaming audio and see what happens. My
only concern here is that streaming usually does a little buffering
before playing the audio. This might be an issue since they already
have a chat system for questions an answers. So if someone asks a
question via chat the speaker might get it when he is on another
topic.

But I would love to make Asterisk work. I am not giving up on it and
that's why Im on this list.

Take care and I will let you know how it turns out and / or if I need
help with a solution.

Thanks againg

Sergio Veltri
www.pointhorizon.com



Message: 25
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 14:06:18 +0200
From: Stefan M?rkle <stefan.maerkle at netpioneer.de>
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Conference solution for 100+ users
To: <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
Message-ID:
       <C545BE20EB7A9B499EA266566D490169EAFAC4 at uhura.ka.netpioneer.de>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="iso-8859-1"

> Hi List,

Hi!

> 1-Skype-like softphone for *. is there any?

None that I know of. But IAX isn't bad in most of the firewalled
environments, give it a try. It only has to get a udp socket open for
an outbound connection (may well be NAT-ed) and to receive the answer
packets back.

> 2-Just do audio streaming and have the customers use windows
> media player. (I dont know how to do this)

This would mean exactly the same prerequisites as an iax-based
solution as the media stream (usually udp) has to be received by the
media players. One technique that circumvents this is using HTTP/1.1
streaming which may or may not work through an application level
http-proxy.

> 3-Use some kind of Softphone with VPN...

Again, if you are able to do an outside connect through the firewall
(as with openvpn which uses udp or with ipsec which uses ip), you can
also do some other things by this means (e.g. iax).

> 4- Do Softphone--->Port 80---> SER--->Asterisk w/meetme.

Only reason for this might be an application level http-proxy that
allows for outbound 'connect' calls, since I don't think you want to
encapsule SIP in HTTP, do you?.
And for the outbound 'connect' method, port 443 might be a better
choice for your port number, but you have to choose a protocol that
uses TCP and only one single socket for this to work.
Maybe using iax over some sort of UDP-in-TCP tunnel could work (like zeebeedee).

> Whatever solution I come up with MUST allow anybody to listen
> in assuming nobody can change firewalls.
> Any one has already done this? Any feedback will be much appreciated.

We're working on similar problems, so if you come up with a perfect
solution, please let me know.
Also, if you are interested in a commercial solution feel free to
contact me off-list.

Stefan Märkle

--
Stefan Märkle                       Netpioneer GmbH
Head Software Architect             Beiertheimer Allee 18
<stefan.maerkle at netpioneer.de>      76137 Karlsruhe, Germany