That's very useful, thanks. Your guess as to my assumption was 100% correct. I presume, therefore, that the Kamailio community have no ambitions to become more "app"y. To be honest, I can quite sympathise with that. I will follow up on your other message as soon as I get a chance.
Hi Alex,
On 02/04/2014 04:52 AM, Alex Lake wrote:
Just trying to get to grips with Kamailio and thought I'd say hello to you all...
Thank you, and welcome to the list and the community!
Not sure if this is of any interest, but I've found it quite hard to get into Kamailio compared to (say) Freeswitch. This is not meant as criticism at all, but if you're looking to make it easier, I may be able to help!
In all fairness, the comparison to something like Freeswitch is a little unwarranted. Kamailio is commonly assumed by newbies to be a finished application product, but it's not; it's really something that should be regarded more as an SDK or a toolkit than as an off-the-shelf piece of OSS VoIP software.
It has a proxy service core, but it doesn't doesn't do anything nontrivial out of the box, isn't intended to, and some programming ability and reference reading is required to make it do what you want. :-)
What I'm trying to do is have a SIP load-balancer such that I can have a set of Freeswitch servers that can have traffic routed to them on a controlled basis, allowing me to point certain accounts at certain servers and take individual servers out of service for upgrade etc.
I think this is SIP server redirection. If there was an example of how to do it - eg. what files need to be changed, any database entries, etc. that would be most useful. Unfortunately, all my Googling/list searching so far has only come up with questions that were either badly worded or not answered. Happy to turn anything I come up with into a beginner-friendly case-study.
This can be (and elsewhere in the industry, often is) done using redirection, but the easier way is probably just to keep Kamailio in series--that is, keep the proxy in the signaling path between the caller and your Freeswitch servers. If Kamailio is able to maintain all the state, this lends itself easily to use of the 'dispatcher' module:
http://kamailio.org/docs/modules/4.1.x/modules/dispatcher.html
... which is designed specifically for load-balancing applications.
-- Alex