November 19, 2012

A new Nova service: nova-conductor

The Grizzly release of OpenStack Nova will have a new service, nova-conductor. The service was discussed on the openstack-dev list and it was merged today. There is currently a configuration option that can be turned on to make it optional, but it is possible that by the time Grizzly is released, this service will be required. One of the efforts that started during Folsom development and is scheduled to be completed in Grizzly is no-db-compute.

April 24, 2012

OpenStack Design Summit and an Eye on Folsom

I just spent a week in San Francisco at the OpenStack design summit and conference. It was quite an amazing week and I’m really looking forward to the Folsom development cycle. You can find a notes from various sessions held at the design summit on the OpenStack wiki. Essex was the first release that I contributed to. One thing I did was add Qpid support to both Nova and Glance as an alternative to using RabbitMQ.

October 6, 2011

Automated Testing of Matahari in a chroot Using Mock

While I was at Digium, I helped build out some automated testing for Asterisk (posts on that here and here). We had a continuous integration server that did builds, ran C API unit tests, and ran some functional tests written in Python. One of the things that we wanted to do with the Asterisk tests is to sandbox each instance of Asterisk. All of this is handled by an Asterisk Python class which creates a new set of directories for each Asterisk instance to store its files.

August 27, 2011

Matahari: Systems Management and Monitoring APIs

I have been working at Red Hat for a few weeks now and have started getting some real work done. I wanted to share what I’m currently working on, and that is Matahari. Matahari is a cross-platform (Linux and Windows so far) collection of APIs accessible over local and remote interfaces for systems management and monitoring. What the heck does that mean? Read on, dear friends. Architecture I mentioned that Matahari is a collection of APIs.

July 18, 2011

Taking On New Challenges

I began working on the Asterisk project in 2004. My work on Asterisk has led to an exciting career in open source software engineering. At the end of July 2011, I will be leaving Digium to take on some new challenges. Specifically, I will be joining the Cloud Infrastructure team at Red Hat as a Principal Software Engineer where I will be working on projects related to clustering, high availability, and systems management.

March 4, 2011

Debugging the Asterisk Dialplan with Verbose()

Leif Madsen and I are working on a new book, the Asterisk Cookbook. One of the recipes that I am working on this morning is a method of adding debug statements into the Asterisk dialplan. I came up with a GoSub() routine that can log messages based on log level settings that are global, per-device, or per-channel. Here’s a preview. I hope you find it useful! Channel logging GoSub() routine. ARG1 - Log level.

February 17, 2011

Asterisk 1.10 Update

I just posted an update on the development of Asterisk 1.10 to the asterisk-dev mailing list. Here is the content: Greetings, Shortly after the release of Asterisk 1.8, we had a developer meeting and discussed some of the projects that people would like to see in Asterisk 1.10 [1]. We discussed the schedule there a bit, as well. Now that Asterisk 1.8 has settled down and we are well into the development cycle for Asterisk 1.

January 6, 2011

Asterisk: The Definitive Guide - Call for Technical Review

We are finally wrapping up our book, “Asterisk: The Definitive Guide”. The contents have been available on a web site for a while, but now that the content is complete, we’re looking for a lot of review over the next couple of weeks. We would really appreciate your input! Here is a post from Leif on the asterisk-doc mailing list from earlier today: Hey all! We’re getting VERY close to having the first draft of the next Asterisk book, Asterisk: The Definitive Guide ready to be sent off to production.

December 22, 2010

Open Source Telephony @ FOSDEM 2011

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source software Developers European Meeting) is an amazing conference held each year in Brussels, Belgium. I have been lucky enough to attend in 2009 and 2010. Both times I was very impressed with the number of attendees and the quality of the talks. For FOSDEM 2011, I am proud to take part in the conference by organizing a day of talks on open source telephony. The talks will take place on Sunday, February 6th.

July 30, 2010

Automated Testing Update

Greetings, A while back, I posted a message about an effort to improve automated testing in the Asterisk project. I wanted to give an update on how that project has progressed for those that have not been following along very closely. We started using Bamboo as a continuous integration tool, which you can find running at http://bamboo.asterisk.org/. Note that some of the pass/fail statistics on there are a bit skewed, as the Bamboo server was just rebuilt and things were failing as everything was put back together.