I got thrown into VoIP in a sink or swim situation — and thankfully, I’m a strong swimmer. I’ve talked previously about my love of phones. Growing up in New York City, my family would purposely avoid walking on certain blocks to avoid me seeing pay-phones. As a child, I loved phones. I still love phones.
My love of phones made me what I am today. I am a Kamailian.
I didn’t invent this word. I flat out stole it from Daniel-Constantin Mierla (he’s to Kamailians what L. Ron Hubbard is to Scientologists).
What are you talking about? What’s a Kamailian?
Kamailians are those who believe and practice the art of Kamailio — the greatest SIP server that the world has ever seen.
Kamailio (former OpenSER) is an Open Source SIP Server released under GPL, able to handle thousands of call setups per second. Among features: asynchronous TCP, UDP and SCTP, secure communication via TLS for VoIP (voice, video), SIMPLE instant messaging and presence, ENUM, least cost routing, load balancing, routing fail-over, accounting, authentication and authorization against MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, Radius, LDAP, XMLRPC control interface, SNMP monitoring. It can be used to build large VoIP servicing platforms or to scale up SIP-to-PSTN gateways, PBX systems or media servers like Asterisk™, FreeSWITCH™ or SEMS. (www.kamailio.org)
For my non-geek readers (like you’d even still be reading), Kamailio allows phones to communicate with each other. Lots of phones. Think US Budget numbers. Kamailio does this in a way that is very efficient, very fast, and very stable — which is exactly what you need when deploying phone systems.
Of course Kamailio isn’t limited to phones… but we’ll talk about that another day.
Why Kamailio? What does Kamailio mean?
When I first started in VoIP, I used a product named OpenSER (SER stands for SIP Express Router). The product was actually a “fork” of the original SER started years earlier. OpenSER worked extremely well — and we used the product to handle 30k+ concurrent registrations, thousands of simultaneous calls, and blistering call set-up rates. The product worked. It worked well. It worked often. Color Fred impressed.
I tell you that story to tell you this story… sometimes open-source projects are a happy-happy-joy-joy group of people where disagreements are settled using skills learned from My Little Ponies. More often, it’s not. In 2008, the OpenSER project split (“forked”) in a very bad way. This was a very black/white, my side/your side, bloods/crips, Luke/Vader kind of split. You were one or the other… and many of us didn’t know where to go.
I talked to as many OpenSER users as possible. Many of whom I only knew by IRC handles or email; some were unsure, some were choosing one side, and some chose the other. In the end, I joined the side with the majority of people I respected in the industry… and haven’t looked back. The split, to this day, remains one of the ugliest I’ve seen in open-source projects— well at least with projects that I’ve been active.
Kamailio is the former OpenSER project. Kamailio, a Hawaiian word, means talk, to converse. Those that embrace Kamailio are Kamailians.
So, if you’re looking for an amazing SIP server that can handle all the traffic you can bring, can provide stability, and loves to work, look no further than Kamailio. It’s what you’ve been looking for. The consultants are friendly, professional, and reliable. Plus… we have cookies.
Congratulations on 10 years of SER and a huge thank you to all of the contributors to Kamailio — celebrating it’s 3rd year of drama free SIP serving.