SIP in higher education

[(Dennis Baron)]

Call today, Thursday, 5/12/05 2:00-3:00 EDT (UTC-4)

Agenda

- Minutes from 3/24, 4/7, and 4/21 calls - All

  See below - any corrections or follow-up items?

- Deployment updates and questions - All

  It's been three weeks so it's probably a good time to check in.  I
  will also ask anyone from last weeks SISP.edu Workshop to join us if
  they are moving forward with a deployment on their campus and have
  any questions.

- Let me know if you have any other items for this or future agendas!

                     Dennis

Thursday 2:00 PM US/Eastern
To join the call, do one of the following:
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SIP.edu Conference Call March 24, 2005

*Attendees*

Derrick Abrams, Oregon State
Dennis Baron, MIT
Alan Crosswell, Columbia 
Jeremy George, Yale
Ed Guy, Pulver
Candace Holman, Harvard
Jeff Kuure, Internet2
Richard Machita, University of Alaska
Yul Pyun, University of Hawaii
Mark Spencer, Indiana University
James Storm, Cisco
Ben Teitelbaum, Internet2
Chris Trown, University of Oregon
Carlos Vincente, University of Oregon
Doug Walston, Cisco

*Discussion*

Today's call begins with Candace's announcement that Harvard's SIP
implementation is up and running, and an updated cookbook has been sent
out. The total number of reachable users is still somewhat of a question
- the exact number is not publicly released, as it depends on how users
have their privacy flags set. At Harvard, email, phone, or both can
be marked as private, and the number of people with their privacy flag
set is not available publicly. The current total of reachable users is
lower than anticipated; however, there has been no press release yet
regarding SIP and the expectation is that some users will change their
privacy flags based on this new service availability.

Following this, Yul discusses Hawaii's deployment. The system is running
CSPS 2.1 on Red Hat Linux 8 and has been in production for several
months; CSPS 2.3 is running on RHEL 3.0 as a test server. Once tested,
both servers will run simultaneously. Hawaii's driving force for SIP
implementation is mostly exploratory, and the project is currently
limited to the IT group on campus. Currently 4500 - 4800 accounts are
reachable and are stored in a database, which pulls a list of active
users from LDAP.

Next is a brief question regarding SIP trunking between universities -
Yale and MIT have done this, but they used local dial plan rules -
this doesn't scale. Others have expressed interest in Internet2
setting up some sort of private ENUM trial, but Internet2 is currently
not interested in pursuing this.

This is followed by an announcement from Cisco representatives regarding
the Cisco SIP.edu package. This software package, which is only available
to Internet2 schools, consists of 2 licenses for CSPS 2.2 for Linux for
$24,000. Users must supply their own hardware, and must also purchase a
support package for $4800.  This is the list price, and normal discounts
can be applied. This package requires Red Hat Enterprise 3.0; it does
not yet support RHEL 4. Hardware requirements consist of 1GB ram, a 36GB
hard drive, and a dual processor computer is recommended. This server
software is rated for up to 20,000 concurrent registrations and 1,000
calls per second, and is primarily intended for service providers.

Dennis then asks about Cisco gateway and phone recommendations for
SIP. The 2800 or 3800 series gateways are suggested, which provide 2 or
4 network module slots, each of which could support multiple PRIs. As
for phones, the 7940, 7960, 7905, 7912, ATA 186, and ATA 188 models are
mentioned as being SIP compatible, and some Linksys products should also
work but haven't been officially tested.

Finally, Carlos from the University of Oregon mentions the progress
being made with their SIP implementation. They have installed a SER proxy
with an Avaya PBX and a Cisco 2600 gateway, and have recently made the
first calls from the PBX to a SIP phone. A meeting is scheduled soon
to discuss policy details, and email address conversion is currently
being done with a Perl script which scrapes the Web directory in real
time. Approximately 7000 users will be reachable, which is low due to
phone numbers not being published by default.

The next call will possibly be March 31; email to confirm will follow.

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SIP.edu Conference Call April 7, 2005

*Attendees*

Dennis Baron, MIT
Alan Crosswell, Columbia 
Ed Guy, Pulver
Jeff Kuure, Internet2
Bruce Mazza, Avaya
Sanjay Sinha, Cisco
Mark Spencer, Indiana University
Ben Teitelbaum, Internet2
Carlos Vincente, University of Oregon
Doug Walston, Cisco
Garrett Yoshimi, Hawaii
Dave Zimmerman, Berkeley

*Discussion*

Today's call begins with Dave Zimmerman providing an overview of Berkeley's 
SIP
implementation. There have been attempts at setting up a campus VOIP system in
the past, and this time it appears that it will finally take hold. The
operations and design group is leading the implementation, while Dave's group
is handling DNS related issues. ENUM will be involved somehow - Dave is
currently looking into learning more about ENUM and what capabilities it can
provide. Carlos suggests that for universities with SIP support, ENUM makes
sense to set up as calls shouldn't be routed through the PSTN.

Dave says that he feels like an answer in search of a question in terms of
ENUM, and asks for more information about what services it can provide. Ed Guy
explains that ENUM simply maps a number to a set of resources, which is most
commonly associated with telephony but could also be applied to instant
messaging, for example.

Following this is a lengthy discussion about setting up some sort of
university-centered ENUM testbed.  Internet2 leadership has decided not to
commit resources to ENUM trials or other PSTN-bypass solutions at this time. 
As
for a root domain, E164.edu is not available as Educause, the .edu registrar,
only allows actual higher ed institutions to register domains. Ed Guy at 
Pulver
offers to host the root domain; numbers will be resolved to URIs, while call
admittance and decisions regarding the use of ENUM are up to the call
originator and terminator.  Ben suggests that anyone considering participation
in an inter-campus ENUM trial, first consult with campus policy advisers to
understand the potential regulatory implications.

The next call will be April 21.

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SIP.edu Conference Call April 21, 2005

*Attendees*

Dennis Baron, MIT
Steve Blair, University of Pennsylvania 
Armin Brunner, Swiss Technical University
Jeremy George, Yale
John Hess, Berkeley
Candace Holman, Harvard
Chris Johnson, University of Oregon
Jeff Kuure, Internet 2
Leo O'Shea, Boston College
Chris Norton, Texas A&M
Yul Pyun, University of Hawaii
Sanjay Sinha, Cisco
Ben Teitelbaum, Internet 2
Mike Van Norman, UCLA
Doug Walsten, Cisco
Garrett Yoshimi, University of Hawaii
Dave Zimmerman, Berkeley

*Discussion*

Today's call begins with Dave Zimmerman from Berkeley following
up on discussion from the previous call, regarding the testbed ENUM
implementation. He and Carlos Vincente from Oregon have signed up with
Ed Guy of Pulver, and have placed entries in his test ENUM route.

The majority of today's call concerns Cisco SIP gateway
configuration. Sanjay from Cisco narrates a series of slides covering
basic configuration information. The slides from this presentation
are available by contacting Doug Walsten 
(),
 and
requests have been made to offer these slides on the SIP.edu website
(http://mit.edu/sip/sip.edu/).

The call concludes with examinations of a Cisco 3725 configuration file
as used by the University of Hawaii, as well as a Cisco 2611 file used
by MIT. Sanjay answers questions from participants regarding specific
sections of the file, as well as hardware and software questions regarding
Cisco products.

At the end of this discussion, Dennis brings up some possible changes
for the SIP.edu cookbook based on the questions and comments brought up
during the question and answer session. One example would be to come
up with a well-documented, bare-bones configuration file for SIP.edu
in order to reduce confusion and eliminate the enabling of unnecessary
options. Another is to offer a list of recommended IOS releases for
various models of Cisco hardware. A suggestion is made for a similar
documented configuration file for the Asterisk gateway.

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