[COLUG] Asterisk vs. OpenSER

[Jeff Frontz]

Duane said:

> SER/OpenSER and friends unfortunately are a bit black magicish when it
> comes to configuring them

Although my experience is strictly limited to configuring asterisk  
and OpenSER as a SIP "registrar" (for use as a target of a load- 
testing tool that I'm developing), I'd have to say this is a massive  
understatement.

It took me about 15 minutes to get asterisk up and running for my  
(admittedly very simple) need; it's taken hours (and HOURS) to get  
OpenSER set up (and I'm still not confident I have it right, since I  
can't reliably reproduce the desired behavior).  Part of this, I'm  
sure, is because OpenSER is more scalable (I configured a user in  
Asterisk using a flat file, while I have to use encapsulated database  
operations via the openser daemon manipulated via commands exchanged  
with a clunky control shell script) and thus has a lot more moving  
parts.  In addition, OpenSER suffers from horrifyingly inadequate  
documentation; the previous version (1.1?) was a lot better (in that  
at least what third-party documentation I could find matched the  
functionality).

If you're only doing onesie-twosie users, Asterisk seems like the way  
to go; if you're wanting to support, say, 20K users, OpenSER seems  
more appropriate.

Oh, also though OpenSER might scale better, my experience is that  
Asterisk more fully embraces the concept of "graceful degradation"--  
when Asterisk gets overloaded, it gets slow, but behaves sanely and  
goes back to normal operation when the load passes; OpenSER seems to  
sometimes lose its mind when it gets overloaded and only a restart  
(perhaps with an associated wipe of its mysql tables) will bring it  
back.

						Jeff