Four cool things from KamailioWorld 2014

April 15, 2014

A week ago I got back from KamailioWorld in Berlin, where I was giving a talk on performance testing. I really enjoyed myself - it's a nicely-run conference, and it's useful to talk to the broader open-source community and find out about new trends (WebRTC, stronger cryptography) and tools.

I've decided to write up (partly for my own reference) four cool tools I learnt about at KamailioWorld and hope to get some use out of in the near future.

The Twinkle softphone

I'd been vaguely aware of the Twinkle softphone, but because it's Linux-only and I use Windows 7 at work, hadn't paid much attention to it - I mostly use cross-platform phones like Jitsi or Blink. However, I noticed the Twinkle configuration window during another presentation, and noticed that it has support for IMS-AKA authentication - this is something hardly any phones have, but which is really imnportant if you'redoing any IMS development or testing. I'll definitely check Twinkle out next time I'm working on AKA.

sipgrep v2

This is an updated rewrite of the old sipgrep tool, moving from Perl to C. I've never used the new or old version, but it has a lot of features that make checking SIP traffic easy compared to just tcpdump - such as coloured output and the ability to match on specific headers. (It may be that it's not much more useful than taking a capture file and opening it in Wireshark - but it's worth a look, and if nothing else it'll be quicker on remote systems.)

mts-project

I was discussing Seagull, the Diameter test tool, and someone pointed me at MTS as an alternative. I'd never heard of it before - and it doesn't obviously come up in search results for a Diameter test tool - but it looks reasonably fully-featured and usable. I'll give it a try next time I need to reproduce a FHoSS bug - I had been building a test suite in JRuby that wrapped the jDiameter stack, but maybe MTS will be a good alternative.

Jitsi Videobridge

This is basically a free-software version of Google Hangouts (which I use a lot for team meetings) - video conferencing over WebRTC. The live demos were pretty impressive, and I'm hoping to set it up one evening and have a play with it for myself. (Unfortunately Firefox's WebRTC support isn't good enough for it yet, which is sad.)

There was a lot of other cool stuff on display - sip:provider ce, CGRateS and OpenEPC, just to name a few - but I've tried to limit this post to just the ones I expect to use myself in the near future. AS you can tell, I learnt a lot from KamailioWorld - here's to next year!