RE: [Serusers] SER/SERWeb Howto...

I don't have docbook, but I can look into it. One of my concerns about attempting to write this is that I'm still learning the process. Another is that I only have the one server running RedHat, so the steps will be oriented that way, at least to start. I will integrate you're suggestions and provide another update shortly. My last question/issue is about dependancies. When I started working with SER I already had MySQL install, version 3.23.36 I believe. I could not get the MySQL portion integration to work, and found that permissions were not correctly granted. After manually correcting the permissions, I had errors about the communications between SER and MySQL. I updated MySQL to the latest stable release and client programs, and the integration worked with no manual intervention. This prompts me to want to include a section about software that SER depends on, or can leverage, and identify the minimum revision known to work. For this section I would need feedback about what has worked for others, as it failed for me with MySQL 3.23.36 and worked with 3.23.56, but I am sure there is a version inbetween. It may have also been a problem with the client programs and libraries. I unfortunately do not have the resources to test all combinations, so if people care to send me a note with what versions they have installed, I can digest it into a recommendation section. Dan -----Original Message----- From: Jan Janak [mailto:J.Janak@sh.cvut.cz] Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 3:41 AM To: Dan Austin Cc: serusers(a)lists.iptel.org Subject: Re: [Serusers] SER/SERWeb Howto... Hello, I like the document. Documentation is one of our biggest issues right now and I think that a description (or howto) written by someone who is not involved in development of SER can better describe problems that real users have. Are you familiar with docbook ? We write all the documentation in docbook because it is easy then to convert it to other formats like html, ps, pdf, rtf and so on. If not, then just plaintext will be fine. Some comments are inline. Thank you very much for your effort ! Keep up the good work. regards, Jan. On 03-12 15:18, Dan Austin wrote: As long as your text describes what you had to do to make ser and serweb work and describes your problems with the software, you are certainly on the right track. Yes, it will be imho valuable, you can consider also kphone which is a free softphone for linux - http://www.wirlab.net/kphone Content-Description: Ser.htm Better than suite I would use word server. By suite I understand also SIP user agent which we do not have. I think that here you can describe only that there are packages for several popular distributions (redhat, suse, gentoo, debian, slackware) and how to install them can be found in documentation (man pages) of a particular package manager. This is redhat specific. /etc/init.d/ser start will be imho better. ser-mysql package contains the script. If you don't have the script, you have no ser-mysql package installed. Here I would describe what the uncommented lines mean. Load mysql module, which extends ser with mysql support. Turn on using of mysql in user location module. There are two ways how to store passwords in the database. You can store them as plaintext passwords, which is easier to maintain for ser beginners. Or you can store HA1 strings. HA1 string is a hash that contains username, password and realm hashed using MD5. Advantage of this approach is that passwords are not stored in plaintext and can be seen easily. This is similar to to /etc/passwd in unix, the server doesn't know passwords, it can only use HA1 to verify responses. If you decide to to use plaintext passwords, uncomment the "calculate_ha1" parameter. If you decide to use HA1, make sure that HA1 strings contain correct realm (the default HA1 string for admin user which comes with ser contains iptel.org as the realm). If you change your realm, you must also change all HA1 strings. Uncomment this line if you use "calculate_ha1" parameter. By default, ser looks into ha1 column for HA1 strings. If you use plaintext passwords, you must tell ser to look into password column for plaintext passwords, this is what this parameter is for. Once you get familiar with serctl command, it would be handy if you could write a description what this command can do and what it can be used for.