libopenr2 and FreeSWITCH

I haven’t taken the time to do some things with FreeSWITCH or anything alike. Actually, I dropped the development of the MFC/R2 endpoint for Digivoice cards and have written nothing since that, so it’s time to come back. As I get no money out if it (either from VoixTel nor anybody), I work on it when I can, so don’t create any expectations about it. I don’t create any about you, the visitor, neither.

One thing I should mention here, is the willingness of Devel IT, a brazilian company, to borrow me some Digivoice cards, free of charge, so that I could write and endpoint for FreeSWITCH to support it. Digivoice itself has borrow me a card, but for a limited time and, when the period has expired, they had asked me to buy the card or to return it.

For some months I’ve used FreeSWITCH in production systems, in the middle of Asterisk and SipXecs to take care of things Asterisk just don’t understand – and to more reliably take care of the things, none wants a PBX software process to hang on gethostbyname() calls when a DNS server is not available. It has shown to be a very stable and rock solid piece of software, easily extensible and many-other-good-things-anyone-can-write-here. Now, Moy, a Mexican software engineer, has come up with another good piece of software: libopenr2.

There are also some brazilians working on the develpment of the library, most notably the ones cited on the CREDITS file, as: Alexandre Cavalcante Alencar, Cleiber Marques da Silva and Humberto Figuera. (NOTE: Humberto Figuera is actually venezuelan, really sorry Humberto.) Melcon Moraes is also notable for taking the time and risk of installing the library on some of our company’s production servers. I know those guys will keep the good work and fix/report any issues they might find.

What I plan to do now, is to make sure the build process works on mac OS X. After that, write an FreeSWITCH endpoint. Besides it’s 4:27am, and I haven’t slept more than 10 hours in the last ~5 days, I’m pretty much excited about all this and I’m anxious to port the library and write the endpoint for FreeSWITCH. The company I co-own uses fonast as it’s gateway platform, which means an Asterisk 1.2 which _a lot_ of fixes from Fonality, but that’s just not acceptable anymore.

The last thing I needed to write for it, was a work-around to get a partial QSIG-CF (ECMA-174) to work with Ericsson MD110 devices. I promised to myself not to touch any Asterisk’s, or libpri’s as that’s the case, anymore, as they’re VERY badly written. As a note, again: I really enjoy what Asterisk has exported, but it doesn’t fit my present needs and I don’t plan to use it on new projects. Anyway, after a hack in libpri, the partial QSIG-CF was working properly with MD110 and our client was happy.

Now to the real solution: let’s see how many days I take to port OpenZAP to OS X and, after that, make libopenr2 build on OS X. That’s the first step to have a FreeSWITCH endpoint which already implements forced disconnection on MFC/R2 Brazilian links, collect calls blocking and some other goodies. Of course I have just my spare time to work on that, but I don’t think It’ll take very long time – and I’m sure it’ll worth it, FreeSWITCH just runs out of the box and fixes the issues we have, instead of adding more. So, I really think the path to the MFC/R2’s FreeSWITCH endpoint is with libopenr2.

The conclusion is a little confusing here, but, for the people who work with those things, the idea is clear. Maybe I’ll try to sleep a little now.