[asterisk-users] SIPit 29 in Monaco - interoperability by hard work

[Olle E. Johansson]

Friends,

SIPit is an event organized by the SIP Forum and partners. It has been running for 15 years twice a year, making sure that SIP clients and servers interoperate. By testing, we also find issues with the myriad of RFCs in this area and correct them. Testing interoperability is important.

The first time I brought Asterisk to SIPit in Stockholm many years ago I was terrified. The SIP stack back then was, well, peculiar. It worked with some SIP phones for basic calls, but not much more. During the tests I learned a lot, got a lot of help from friendly engineers and fixed a large amount of bugs. Afterwards I had a list of todo's that kept me busy for quite some time. It helped Asterisk leaping forward in the SIP area. We've grown since then and Digium, as a member of the SIP Forum, hosted a SIPit in Huntsville a while ago, testing both Asterisk and the new baby, Asterisk SCF. I have hosted a SIPit here in Sweden. The Asterisk eco system  believes in interoperability and we work hard to stay interoperable with the world of SIP.

This year at SIPit we'll run all kinds of tests. I will personally focus on security and IPv6 tests. Together with the Kamailio/SIP-router team, I've built automatic tests in these areas. Hopefully we can complete them and make them public. (We have a few cool Allison prompts for them too!)  I guess I will find a few new bugs as well :-)

So why am I writing to the Asterisk-users mailing list about this? It's not about showing off, it's about explaining how interoperability happens. Customers need to require interoperability and open standards, not accept any vendor lock-ins. Vendors and Open Source developers need to take the lead and work together to get interoperability. Customers need to test. 

So if you are a developer of SIP products that interact with Asterisk - please register for SIPit today. If you are a customer, please ask your vendors if they participate in SIPit. If you have a lot of knowledge about Asterisk, please register and come test Asterisk 10. 

If you are a happy Asterisk user, please understand that the great level of interoperability that we have in Asterisk, communicating with all kinds of devices and servers out there, just did not happen by accident. It required a lot of work by a large group of developers. And you benefit.

I'll try to keep you posted about the progress of the tests. I can't name specific vendors that participate, it's part of the deal. But we can talk about the test results, the state of certain features. Personally I hope that we can succeed in many more tests with TLS and SRTP this event. And we'll have some fun with IPv6 and dual stack implementations as well.

Thanks for reading!

Have a nice weekend!

/O