It looks like Corey Edwards and I will be leading a discussion on FreeSWITCH and Asterisk at a “Birds of a Feather” presentation this Thursday at UTOSC.

Here’s the presentation abstract we submitted:

VoIP: FreeSWITCH and Asterisk

FreeSWITCH and Asterisk users will be gathering with all those interested in learning more about Open Source Telephony. We’ll do some group discussion, Q&A and generally mingle. If there is time and sufficient interest, we can share some things we’ve done with FreeSWITCH.  Come and share your hacks!

Likely topics include:

• Why FreeSWITCH?
• Why Asterisk?
• How do Asterisk, FreeSWITCH and other Open Source PBX/media switches compare?
• What features do they each currently support?
• What are the short comings of each platform?
• What is the state of development for each project?
• What does each community need?
• Where are they being used? And for what?
• Common deployment practices, tips and tricks.

Everyone is welcome, from newbs to 1337 hax0r5!

Whether you’re interested in enabling voice in your application, setting up a call center, or just getting rid of your current (clunky | old | dusty | stinky | beige) proprietary phone system; this will be an excellent primer on the open source options that are available.

And for anyone who’d like to see open source telephony in action, I’ll also be prepared to showcase some of the the FreeSWITCH and Asterisk-based custom telephony applications our team at Izeni has developed for a number of Utah clients.

There will be lots of smart people there to answer your questions, so if you’re in Utah and you’re interested in learning more about open source telephony (or if you just want hangout and talk shop) you should sign up and come check us out! (Thursday only passes are available for just $10!)

I’ve known that Utah was a hot-spot for tech and I assumed it was a great place for Open Source hackers. This post over at Pingdom seems to confirm my suspicions. The point is that no matter what Linux or Open Source topic you pick, Utah tends to be at the top of that search trend. Try it: Linux #1, Kernel #2, BSD #2, GNU #2, GPL #1, Apache #1, Postfix #1, Bash #1, Python Scripting #3, Asterisk #1, IPTables #1, Cron #1, MySQL #1, PostgreSQL #1… As you see, I could go on and on. I don’t know what can really be learned from those rankings, but one thing is sure – there is a lot of local interest in Open Source.

Just for fun, let’s see how Utah does for 5 random words. Thinking… taco (not in top 10), printing (not in top 10), ear plugs (not in top 10), drills #9 and microwave (not in top 10). Well, I’m glad I’m not selling drills door-to-door.

Also, I find it interesting that while I’ve been looking for different types of work (in this order: consulting, contracting, business opportunities and full-time work), nearly everyone I’ve interviewed with wants full-time employees. They say that although business is down a little (economy, or whatever), they’re all mostly cookin’. I say, good for them, good for Utah and good for me. ;)

In the past, I’ve made fun of your distro while you where not around.
I’ve poked fun at your package management.
I’ve installed over OpenSuse with other distros.
I’ve blown away partitions reserved for OpenSuse.
I’ve ignored your releases.

But today, that all changes. Today, I give it a fair shake.

I’ll let you know what I think in a week.

Anyway, it’s fun to think that as I sleep, there are people in Asia or Europe browsing the web server that warms the space under my stairs. :)

Two things about this site are bound to change this year. One, I’ll be writing my own blogging system (in Django). Two, I’ll be working on making the information here more helpful to those who visit. It won’t be a big deal; I’ll just be making an effort to think about what the reader may need to know, giving better links, invite questions, etc.

Here’s to a great new year!

I’m going to be doing some drawings of custom Xen networks, but until then, here are a few drawings of default Xen networks to serve as a point of reference.

This first one just shows how a non-Xen networking setup might look. The white box is just a label. Not much to see :)

Now, we’ll look at what starting xend does to our network. Later on, I’ll try to blog about the scripts that make this change and how they work. If you boot into your Xen kernel in and haven’t done anything with Xen yet, this is what your setup looks like (well, maybe).

If you bring up a guest OS (DomU), this is what your networking will look like. This set-up is suitable for most Xen installs.

More to come…

Update: Changed the X in vifX.Y to match the domain ID. Good eye Lamont.

Besides local package management, it makes it easy to fork the distro. Why would anyone want that?! Well, people don’t really want to fork anything, they just want a few things that aren’t currently offered, so they take the distro they know (often RHEL or Debian) and start making changes. Usually it’s more work then they can keep up with and things fall apart. If they do “make it” the deltas get bigger and bigger until any benefit that comes from the fork is lost.

What if distros encouraged a community of hackers around their base distro? As long as they don’t steal customers, don’t burden the Upstream Providers (UP) with support and offer clean patches, wouldn’t that be welcome? Isn’t it a complement of sorts to be forked? And, what if the UP made it so easy to keep in sync that small projects could actually thrive and stick around long enough to give something back to the UP? At the very least, more and more people would learn how to run a system that’s like the UP, and those skills would port if they ever switched to the UP’s distro. I’m thinking more then just SRPMS, I’m thinking a Conary based distro and repos.

So really, we’re not talking about a “hostile fork” in the classic sense. We are talking about a “loving spoon.” It seems to me that once the sweetness that is Conary becomes more and more common place (and I believe it will), there will be great value in being the distro that people choose as the root of their distro. That sounds like a good fit for Fedora Core, or even better, RHEL or Debian. One would think that Red Hat and Debian would want to preempt each other with such a move.

As it stands, rPath is nicely positioned to lead out in this space. Currently their interests are focused on appliances, but what about general purpose distros? That can’t be that far behind. I for one, will be looking at rPath to use as a base for one of my projects. Plus, the guys over at rPath are super helpful. I wish them the best (if Red Hat and Debian sit on their hands in this regard, it looks like rPath just might get it).

Anyone see where I’m going with this? Does anyone agree? Anyone think I’m nuts?

I leave you with a bit this fitting 1966 classic by the LOVIN’ SPOONFUL:

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn’t it a pity
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head…

From the announcement:

Asterisk® can now be easily configured with a graphical interface. The new site, AsteriskNOW.org, which is still in development, hosts AsteriskNOW™ Beta. AsteriskNOW™ Beta is a Software Appliance; a GUI implementation with the open source Asterisk distribution. AsteriskNOW includes all the Linux components necessary to run, debug and build Asterisk, and only those components, so installation is easy. You no longer have to worry about kernel versions and package dependencies. Unlike other Linux distributions used to deploy Asterisk, no unnecessary components that might compromise security or performance are included.

I’m usually very suspicious of GUIs used to configure servers, but if Digium is behind it, I’ll at least give it a look. A “distro” based install of Asterisk sounds like a great trouble-free approach when installing for someone that doesn’t have full-time sysadmins.

I’m still going to be using CentOS or RHEL for my personal stuff and wondering about the real question… When will the Zaptel drivers make it into the kernel?

Update: Looks like the distro is rPath Linux.