Re: Fall meeting

[John Kristoff <>]

On 18 Oct 2002 10:05:33 -0400
Ben Teitelbaum 
<>
 wrote:

> I would really enjoy hearing some experience reports from anyone doing
> SIP trials.  My understanding is that five schools took PingTel up on
> its SIPxchange beta program and I know of others who have been looking
> at CSPS and iptel's open source SER.  You know who you are. ;-)

We've been interested in doing SIP for awhile and have recently brought
up Pingtel's beta server.  Awhile back we had bough a small number of
their phones and had planned to use them with the Vovida's VOCAL server.

We had purchased both some Pingtel hardware phones and Cisco 7960
phones, assuming we could do SIP on them and in conjunction with the
VOCAL server.  The Pingtel phones are simple enough to use out of the
box, even without a server, you can just dial by IP if you want to test
basic functionality.  Without a SIP server, the Cisco 7960's require
configuring each phone with peer SIP phone configuration info.  The
number of peers you can configure is limited, but more importantly for
testing SIP on Cisco's, this is a major hassle.  Especially when you can
configure everything fairly easy directly on the phone with Pingtel, as
opposed to having to create the proper config files and install them
along with SIP specific code to the Cisco phone via TFTP.

We started building a VOCAL server on a Solaris 8 box.  At the time of
our testing, we were using VOCAL 1.30RC2, a newer version exists, but I
have not tested it.  My installation report can be found here:

  http://www.vovida.org/pipermail/vocal/2001-November/003149.html

Overall, I wasn't very impressed with VOCAL's setup and configuration
requirements.  I ended up not going much further than the install. 
Shortly thereafter we heard Pingtel was trying to help the SIP server
market by building one themselves.  We were very interested since we
didn't see that anyone had one that was all that great yet.

As of this month, we have installed Pingtel's beta server on a RedHat
7.3 box.  I have notes on that process and I can clean them up and make
them available if anyone is interested.  In a nutshell, you have a
server that runs Apache and some Java-based applications that are used
to manage the directory of users, devices, group and so on.  Information
is managed by postgresql.  You setup a small number of SRV records in
your DNS so phones can easily contact the SIP server using the SIP port
and to do look-ups for using the 'sip:<user>@example.com' syntax. 
Overall it seems to be working well enough.  We're just starting to do
detailed analysis of calls, potential problems and usability.

The next thing we are waiting for Pingtel to finish up what they call
the media server component for the server.  This adds voicemail.  I
believe its almost finished and we should be seeing and testing it soon.

John

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