Giacomo Vacca

Kamailio is an open source VoIP server, widely used in the VoIP industry for its performance and feature set. kamailio-tests is a project that aims to provide a level of automated testing for developers. The main idea is that simple things like loading a module or calling a core or module function can be tested without building an entire infrastructure around Kamailio. Also, we want to be able to perform the tests against various versions of Kamailio, and on various OS distributions. In this way a backward incompatible function or a regression can be discovered by a developer even though their system uses one single version and OS combination. This includes also third party libraries, e.g. you may think of testing the HTTP clients with different curl libraries, while Kamailio and OS stay at the same version. kamailio-test doesn't perform tests at function level (but it requires the application to run) or "integration testing" (because in order to re...

The Kamailio Developers Meeting is a two-day event held in Dusseldorf, currently at the second edition.  As described in https://www.kamailio.org/w/developers-meeting/,  "The purpose of the event is to support the interaction between developers and to offer a great environment to work together on relevant topics related to the Kamailio project. It is intended for participants that want to write code for Kamailio and its tools or improve the documentation. There will be no formal presentations, only open discussions, coding or documentation writing sessions." The sipgate offices offered a very welcoming environment. Noticeable to have a kitchen with chefs for breakfast and lunch, and a private pub, where the social event was held. I noticed the presence of art works and learned that those offices are also part of an art itinerary in Dusseldorf. We started listing the topics that we wanted to tackle during the event, then discussed a plan to go through them. ...

In the first part of my brain dump about this year's edition of Kamailio World I focused mainly on testing. Core developers and application designers want to be able to test the behaviour of Kamailio -based architectures with minimal effort and fast feedback. A different dimension to testing, that I haven't mentioned in my previous post, was related to Fuzz testing . There were two presentations focused on this: Sandro Gauci's (The easiest way to understand who Sandro is: listen on port 5060 on the public Internet and wait a couple of minutes. You'll see a SIP request from a tool called sipvicious (aka friendly-scanner), a penetration testing tool Sandro wrote (and others misuse)) and Henning Westerholt , historical member of the Kamailio community. Sandro's presentation focused around fuzzing approaches for RTC in general ( slides ), while Henning was more specifically focused on Kamailio. Fuzzing is a sophisticated technique to verify the robustness...

This was my fifth time in a row attending Kamailio World in Berlin. The weather was warmer and sunnier than usual. Apart from the obvious focus on Kamailio , as usual the RTC ecosystem was well represented (with Janus, Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, Homer, RTPEngine, and many others). Attendance from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean gave stronger emphasis to the "World" term in the title. My personal mission this year was to talk about a framework for testing Kamailio as a tool for developers and maintainers of the project: kamailio-tests . The main concept was that early tests that are not focused on a specific business logic (as we all have in our projects) and can be automated will be beneficial to Kamailio's reliability. We want to defer end-to-end testing to later stages, because they are expensive. To provide a uniform infrastructure where to run the tests, without requiring permanent test environments, we use Docker for this. This is, of course, not th...

An interesting pattern that caught my attention is the role that Lua is gaining in the RTC (Real-Time Communications) world. Lua is a small-footprint programming language, powerful while keeping a simple syntax. I’ve been using Lua to script dialplan actions for FreeSWITCH since about 2014. It has provided me with a way to define relatively complex logic and speed up the definition of FS’ behaviour. Delegating this type of logic to a scripting language had several advantages, such as: It’s easier to read and understand than native dialplans or native routing logic. Makes unit testing of the dialplan possible/easier. Allows changing some pieces of logic easily, in many cases preventing expensive reload of modules or restart of applications. I’ve been using Lua for Kamailio as well. Kamailio is an open source programmable SIP Proxy . In a specific case, some bits of the routing logic required regex processing and was expecting to change often: an ideal case for...

I've presented a workshop at Kamailio World 2016 . It focused on tools to help automating the build, deployment and test of Kamailio -based applications using Jenkins , Docker and a few other technologies. It's been also an opportunity to show a sample usage of the new http_async_client module, designed to perform non-blocking HTTP queries from Kamailio. The interested reader can find the slides here: Continuous Integration and Kamailio from Giacomo Vacca And if you have an hour to spare, here's the full video: Any feedback or question you may have, please get in touch. I have a post on the event in progress, but there are so many things to highlight that it will require some more time. Many thanks to Daniel and Elena-Ramona ( more info here ), event hosts, and Pascom.net for video streaming, recording and editing.

Almost three years ago I started automating the deployment of all server-side applications with Puppet . One of the key applications in Truphone's RTC platform (and arguably in most of VoIP/WebRTC platforms today) is Kamailio , so with some proper encapsulation it’s been possible to build a Puppet module dedicated to it. This is now publicly available on PuppetForge . Puppet Forge is a public repository of Puppet modules. We use many of them, and they can be incredibly useful to get you up to speed and solve common problems. You can also fork it on github , if you want. You can use this module in different ways: To quickly deploy a kamailio instance, with default configuration files. As the basis for a custom configuration, where you use the official debian packages but with your own configuration details and business logic. The first approach is very simple. Imagine you start from and empty VM or base docker container: all you have to do is install pup...

Automatic Configuration Management For Kamailio And Asterisk from Giacomo Vacca