September 9, 2007

Asterisk Clustering - Improvements for distributed services

One of the areas that I am very interested in right now is coming up with new ways to distribute Asterisk services across multiple servers, both locally with Asterisk clustering, or distributed with servers across the internet. Off and on this year I have been working on an event system. I want to have a framework that is easy to use such that when certain events occur on one server, they can be propogated to a federation of servers.

September 7, 2007

Astricon 2007, September 24-27, Phoenix, AZ

Astricon is coming up very soon, so I figured I would point out some of the things that the development team will be doing at the conference. There are two big pre-conference activities for Tuesday, September 25th. Asterisk 101 - An introduction to Asterisk Developer 101 - An introduction to Asterisk development Myself, and a number of other developers, will be spending all day talking about important things to know to be an active Asterisk developer.

September 5, 2007

New Asterisk API: Audiohooks

There is a new Asterisk API in town, and it is called Audiohooks. It was developed by Joshua Colp, a fellow Asterisk developer and friend. As you may have inferred from the name, the audiohooks API lets you add hooks into the audio passing through an Asterisk channel. There are a lot of exciting things that can be done with this, including places where it is already in use. First, let me explain how this came about.

August 29, 2007

Asterisk-dev: Application timeouts, Periodic and Scheduled Announcements

I have made a post to the asterisk-dev mailing list describing a small project I am working on. I am making a way to create application timeouts, scheduled announcements, and periodic announcements that can be used with any Asterisk application. The results of the discussion will determine if this feature goes anywhere or hits the bit bucket.

August 27, 2007

Open Source: Changing Models, Changing Mindsets, Part 2

Linux Insider has posted Part 2 of their article on some of the impacts of open source software on the corporate world. There is more discussion of Asterisk in this article. The open source Asterisk digital PBX (public branch exchange) platform “is the most interoperable, flexible and feature rich PBX in the market today,” asserted Chad Agate, cofounder and CEO of NeoPhonetics. The article mentions Asterisk’s powerful architecture that lets it fit an extremely diverse set of needs in the telecom market.

August 26, 2007

Open Source: Changing Models, Changing Mindsets, Part 1

Linux Insider has an article on open source software and its impact on the corporate world. It mentions Asterisk for its impact on the traditional telephony market and its use in the corporate world’s transition toward the use of VoIP. Asterisk-based VoIP applications and appliances have been downloaded by business phone system users more than 4.4 million times, implying millions of users, according to Digium, whose founder, Mark Spencer, started what has grown to become Asterisk’s globe-spanning open source project collaboration.

August 25, 2007

Asterisk-commits: Inband DTMF Detector Improvements

We got a very interesting patch to improve the reliability of the Inband DTMF detector. Some poor debouncing logic was making it very possible to miss a digit when it didn’t start very clean. Here is the commit and also the related discussion on the asterisk-dev mailing list. Many thanks to Tony Mountifield for the patch!

August 25, 2007

Asterisk-users: "Stable-stable Asterisk" thread

There has been a thread on the Asterisk-users mailing list about the various opinions about upgrading Asterisk versions. I spent some time reflecting on the differences over time between Asterisk 1.0, 1.2, and now, 1.4, and posted my thoughts to the thread. The List Archives

August 24, 2007

AST-2007-021 - Asterisk IMAP storage of voicemail vulnerability

The Asterisk development team has published a security advisory for a minor security issue related to IMAP storage of voicemail. A properly crafted email in the mailbox that Asterisk tries to open to play voicemail messages can cause the application to crash. See the security advisory for details on the issue.

August 24, 2007

Zaptel 1.2.20.1 and 1.4.5.1 released

The Asterisk.org development team has announced the release of Zaptel versions 1.2.20.1 and 1.4.5.1. These releases are to correct an error in the install target in the Makefile of the 1.4.5 and 1.2.20 Zaptel releases, as well as a handful of other issues. See the respective Changelogs for more details. Both releases are available as a tarball as well as a patch against the previous release. They are available for download from downloads.