SIP in higher education

[(Dennis Baron)]

Call tomorrow, Thursday, 3/24/05 2:00-3:00 EST (UTC-5)

Agenda

- Minutes from 2/17/05 and 3/3/05 meetings - All
  See below - any corrections?

- Deployment updates - All
  
  Updates from Hawaii and Harvard and others?  Any of the other Cisco
  schools have updates?

- Cisco SIP Proxy Promotion - Doug Walsten

  Doug will tell us about the CSPS package that Cisco has put together
  for schools implementing SIP.edu.

- As always, let me know if you have any other items for this or
  future agendas!

                     Dennis

Thursday 2:00 PM US/Eastern (UTC-5)
To join the call, do one of the following:
  a. Dial +1-734-615-7474, or
          +1-800-392-6130, or 
          +1-866-411-0013 and enter access code 0153458, or
  b. Call 
sip:,
 or
  c. To have the system call you, click here:
          https://edial.internet2.edu/call/0153458

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SIP.edu Conference Call February 17, 2005

*Attendees*

Dennis Baron, MIT
Jeremy George, Yale
Candace Holman, Harvard
Jeff Kuure, Internet2
Richard Machita, Alaska
Mark Spencer, Indiana University
Ben Teitelbaum, Internet2
Doug Walson, Cisco
Garrett Yoshimi, Hawaii



*Discussion*

Today's discussion begins with Mark Spencer detailing Indiana University's
SIP implementation. Using products by Interactive Intelligence
(http://www.inin.com), the university has set up a Windows Server 2003
based SIP proxy server. User information is retrieved from a SQL Server
database (as opposed to an LDAP directory) and calls are routed through
an Interactive Intelligence gateway. A web interface allows call plan
configuration. The software license allows for basic routing and an
unlimited number of sites for $200. For $5000, other services, such as
client registration, are available. Currently, the university is using
the less expensive option and has had no difficulties.

Thought has gone into allowing client registration, but this has led to
political discussions about SIP usage on campus and debate regarding
billing for SIP service. SIP is being thought of as a possible POTS
migration, but again policy issues and questions about service between
the Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses will have to be resolved.

Following this, Candace mentions a new problem with Harvard's SIP
implementation. Past issues with the Avaya LDAP plugin have been
discussed before; the most recent problem occurred following an upgrade
from CCS 0.35 to 0.38 - following this upgrade, everything stopped
working. Downgrading back to 0.35 has restored service. Candace has
advised to avoid upgrading to 0.38 if it can be avoided.

Dennis then discusses his complete conversion to SIP as he is no longer
using his ISDN phone. He also mentions a recent configuration mistake with
setting up dial peers which was causing a 3-second delay in all SIP calls.

Candace, Garrett, and Dennis then recount their recent tests of the
eyeBeam SIP client (www.xten.com), which does IM, video, recording,
and presence. The client does conference calling with audio mixing,
offers a variety of audio codecs, and offers high quality audio and easy
account switching. An SDK is also offered (for Windows only), and there
are Mac clients as well as an audio-only Pocket PC client.

Finally, Richard asks about help with gateway configuration issue. This
leads to requests for Cisco people to do a configuration demo, both from
the gateway and the PBX side of the equation.

The next call will be on Thursday, March 3th.

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SIP.edu Conference Call March 3, 2005

*Attendees*

Dennis Baron, MIT
Chris (?), Oregon
Arthur Gaylord, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
Jeremy George, Yale
Candace Holman, Harvard
Karl Kreuger, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
Jeff Kuure, Internet 2
Bruce Mazza, Avaya
James Stormes, Cisco
Mark Spencer, Indiana University
Ben Teitelbaum, Internet 2
Yul Pyun, University of Hawaii
Mike Van Norman, UCLA
Carlos Vincente, Oregon
Mike West, Avaya

*Discussion*

Today's call begins with a reminder about the upcoming workshop, to be
held on Thursday, May 5 and Friday, May 6 after the spring Internet 2
Member Meeting.

Following this, Candace talks about Harvard's progress with the Avaya LDAP
plugin. Avaya provided a .so for Linux systems which is configured using
a text config file.  Small changes must be made to a few other system
files as well. The plugin, which only works with Avaya systems, can be
configured to use multiple LDAP servers, to do lookups based on criteria
such as phone number or email address, and to set phone prefixes, among
other things. In addition, the configuration file enables an organization
to set criteria for zero or multiple query results. It currently supports
multiple domains, but does not allow queries to different LDAP servers
based on domain. However, this could change in the future.

Candace concludes with a mention of Harvard's privacy policy - currently
only 20,000 employee records can be queried, and only those from employees
who agree to have their email and phone number made public. Candace
has submitted plugin troubleshooting documentation for the SIP.edu
cookbook. Harvard hopes to make SIP available to the campus soon,
hopefully by next week.

Regarding the cookbook, requests are made for a generic section on dial
plans, as well as a best practices overview.

Finally, Art and Karl discuss Woods Hole's configuration system for
SIP devices. The WHOI administrators have moved towards storing server
and host configuration information, including those for SIP phones,
in databases and automating as much as possible. In addition, users are
granted as much control over phone configuration as possible  via a Web
interface. Devices and user IDs are not treated separately right now -
for example, there is no way to turn off a specific user ID for a device,
such as when a user goes out of town. But they are looking into allowing
users to control call processing - sending calls to a lab first, for
example, then to their desk, and finally their cell phone.

The goal is to unify device configuration and user information. For any
phone configuration, the database can generate a configuration file
- the phone starts up, gets an IP address via DHCP, and is served a
config file based on its MAC address. SIP passwords are not necessarily
transmitted securely, but there are only limited things that can be
done with this password. H350 was explored for device configuration,
but was too complicated. SIP phones are considered to be just another
host on the network, and use the same DHCP server and configuration
database as everything else.

The next call will be on Thursday, March 17th.

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