PIONEERS The Next Horizon: sipXecs

[hecatae]

Has anyone else seen Sipxecs by Sipfoundry?

http://wiki.sipfoundry.org/display/sipXecs/Installing+on+Fedora+and+CentOS

currently on 4.6.0 stable, testing 4.10. Also integrates homer http://www.sipcapture.org/ and has a mongodb back end and can be clustered, I'm pretty impressed how it does NAT traversal.

Seems to be under an AGPL license

 

[kenn10]

Has anyone else seen Sipxecs by Sipfoundry?

I'm a little surprised we haven't heard more about this one. It even supports Shared Call Appearance on some phones. wardmundy might have something to say about it if he has looked at it.

 

[wardmundy]

I'm a little surprised we haven't heard more about this one. It even supports Shared Call Appearance on some phones. wardmundy might have something to say about it if he has looked at it.

Downloading now.

 

[hecatae]

the wiki seems out of date,

the latest version is 14.04

http://download.sipfoundry.org/pub/sipXecs/ISO/
the wget command for installing on top of minimal centos is

wget -P /etc/yum.repos.d http://download.sipfoundry.org/pub/sipXecs/14.04/sipxecs-14.04.0-centos.repo

I'm currently installing 14.04 as I cant get the unstable 14.10 to install via binaries

 

[wardmundy]

For those that want to play, we've uploaded a Virtual Box image of sipXecs-14.04 to SourceForge which is available now.

Getting Started

• Download and then double-click on the sipXecs.ova file after installing VirtualBox on your desktop computer.
• Start the virtual machine.
• Log in as root:password. Change your password: passwd
• Update your SSH credentials if you ever decide to put this in production:

rm -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host*
rpm -e openssh-server
yum -y install openssh-server
service sshd restart

• Decipher your IP address: ifconfig
• Using a browser, log in to sipXecs: https://yourIPaddress
• Set up a very secure superadmin password.
• Log in as superadmin:yournewpassword
• Start reading along with us.

 

[hecatae]

is this running well for everyone else, my test beds keep crashing the web interface after a few hours.

 

[kenn10]

I have it running in a VMWare environment but haven't done much with it. Its been running for about a week and I haven't lost web access yet. I haven't been pounding at it, rather just pondering whether I want to waste time on it or not. It is heavy on the Cisco and Polycom phone support and I have Aastra sets which it won't auto-provision. I hope to have more time to play with it in the coming weeks.

 

[tbrummell]

We use it where I work, although our developers have heavily modified it for our purposes. It runs well, including our HA set up, but ours doesn't have a lot of toys included in it, it's just built for high uptime.

 

[billsimon]

is this running well for everyone else, my test beds keep crashing the web interface after a few hours.

Last time I looked at this software, which was probably about two years ago, I found that it needed a lot of computing resources just to sit idle. You're probably running out of memory and the OS is killing off your web server processes.

 

[hecatae]

new instructions available on the wiki, going to try again, seeing as 14.10 is out

3. Increase Max Number of ulimit open files and max user processes for MongoDB
 
edit /etc/sysctl.conf to add fs.file-max = 65536 line
edit /etc/security/limits.conf to add the following block of text:
*          soft    nproc          65535
*          hard    nproc          65535
*          soft    nofile        65535
*          hard    nofile        65535
c. reboot

 

[SkykingOH]

You know Nortel runs this project? Seems like anything but FreePBX. I will keep beating the drum. If anyone is at IT Expo in Miami I will be in the FreePBX both, come say hi.

 

[wardmundy]

I think we all pretty much know which booth you are in, SkykingOH.

Thought you might enjoy this little story: http://fee.org/freeman/detail/whose-bread-i-eat-his-song-i-sing

 

[kenn10]

More appropriate to the state of our declining U.S. Democratic Constitutional Republic than to FreePBX. Consider the Democrats that patient man.

Sorry Ward, but you opened that door. FreePBX could be considered an "entitlement" and the contributors to the project are "Tax Payers." The State of the economy is forcing reduction of support for the "entitlement" from corporate sponsors. The majority of FreePBX users contribute nothing monetarily, in coding, or in feedback. So they become the "entitled" and expect more and more and more and more for free.

I honestly think that FreePBX will either need to be forked to retain the original values to the community or alternative GUI's will need to be developed. So far, the original elegance of FreePBX has not been surpassed. I hope an evolution in Asterisk and/or FreeSwitch GUI's is on the cusp.

 

[billsimon]

You know Nortel runs this project?

Nice try. They did, six years ago. http://wiki.sipfoundry.org/display/sipXecs/Project+History

Did you know Fonality runs the FreePBX project?

 

[SkykingOH]

Of course I knew about Avaya...I didn't know they exited the project 5 years ago...ouch

I guess I don't understand. The rate of development on FreePBX and Asterisk has never been higher. Userbase increasing. More funding from Sangoma. Why does it need to be forked? How could that possibly be good for the project or PBXIAF?

 

[vic555]

Fonality discontinued support; We need to move on, and find creditable open sources.

 

[wardmundy]

Of course I knew about Avaya...I didn't know they exited the project 5 years ago...ouch

I guess I don't understand. The rate of development on FreePBX and Asterisk has never been higher. Userbase increasing. More funding from Sangoma. Why does it need to be forked? How could that possibly be good for the project or PBXIAF?

Did you actually read the Nerd Vittles article?? Did you think I was making this up?

 

[billsimon]

Of course I knew about Avaya...I didn't know they exited the project 5 years ago...ouch

I guess I don't understand. The rate of development on FreePBX and Asterisk has never been higher. Userbase increasing. More funding from Sangoma. Why does it need to be forked? How could that possibly be good for the project or PBXIAF?

I just came here to call out your Nortel remark. ;-)

I personally think it's a bad idea to fork it. To be clear, I'm not calling for that and would consider it a last resort option, only to be used if Sangoma started to go in a very different direction with the whole project. I disagree with a lot of the forum members here who assume bad things will come simply because the project has changed corporate ownership.

PS: sipXecs is really a dog and I hope folks don't waste too much more time with it. There is a reason no one talks about it...

 

[wardmundy]

There are plenty of terrific Asterisk-based commercial solutions available. We've already identified at least five! When you pull back the covers, that's exactly where the FreePBX Distro fits. It's not open source. It's not GPL. Scott trumpets its awesomeness, but that's because Scott makes a living selling it... as a commercial PBX. It turns out that the way other vendors have been treated, FreePBX (the GUI) wasn't much different... without litigation. Can Sangoma fix that? Sure they can IF they want to. But they've been extremely quiet since Jan. 1. That tells me they'd prefer to let this blow over and stick with business as usual. One has to wonder whether Sangoma did its due diligence homework. They certainly didn't speak with us. And remember, the same guys still are in the driver's seat doing things much the same way as best we can tell. The financial incentive package that's part of the Sangoma deal suggests that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

Let me suggest that we take a deep breath and patiently explore what else is available. Then let's objectively weigh the pro's and con's of the alternatives. We also haven't (yet) heard from Digium, and that may include some surprises as well. Will we find the perfect open source, (true) GPL GUI product? Who knows. We sure don't have one with FreePBX unless you want to hire a bunch of lawyers.

I can tell you that the number of available options is staggering, and some of the products are truly amazing. Many of those we've spoken with are interested! Whether we can reach a deal that everyone is comfortable with remains to be seen, but I am optimistic. I also think this process is long overdue given the manner in which some folks have been treated.

 

[SkykingOH]

I need to be a little more careful about helicoptering into these discussions. It's still fun to stir the pot:

1 - Ward read your blog up to the history lesson in IT M and A - Gotta a little long after that. I didn't find any gross historical inaccuracies and it's interesting to see the take from another perspective. The contractual stuff between Schmooze and PBXiaf I have no knowledge of. I am under NDA with Schmooze which transfers to Sangoma in Spirit so I have to steer clear of those conversations anyway.

What I can clear up is I don't "make my living selling FreePBX" myself nor Micro Advantage has ever sold or charged for FreePBX. We are very clear that the software is Open Source in our T&C's and we provide support and deployment expertise. With our hosted services we provide a virtual machine running a variety of Open Source packages that we supply for our customers convenience at no cost. There is no price difference between a hosted FreePBX Distro or a bare bones KVM that you upload your own ISO.

I am sure it doesn't carry any weight however I will say it publicly. I have never known Schmooze or Tony personally to not honor their obligations. I am very picky about who my friends and business associates are. In the 7 or 8 eight years I have been dealing with Tony and Schmooze they have never owed me a dime and have always been more than fair when our account balance got farther out than it should.

So from a business standpoint Schmooze and FreePBX have been good partners for me. The Open Source is very important also as we help our local churches and non-profits setup great communications and IT infrastructure they could never afford if not for Open Source. It's part of our Corporate DNA to give back. It's great to talk about opinions but please don't ascribe motives.

Carry on.