My SIP Switch

Following my previous article about PhonerLite I wanted to write a quick review of his elder brother : Phoner

http://www.phoner.de/index_en.htm

It’s a Windows only softphone (95/98/ME/NT40/2000/XP)

The configuration is also made with a step by step Wizard (nearly the same one as PhonerLite), so it is really convenient and easy. I tested it with My SIP Switch and my impressions were the same as for PhonerLite : really fast to get started, easy to use and I cannot complain at all on the audio quality.

It is fully compatible with SIP and has all the main options/feature you would expect on a softphone. What makes it a bit special is that it has ISDN facilities (which is not that common on a softphone). Note that you need an ISDN adapter.

The complete list of features is available here : Phoner Features

I discovered today (Thanks to our user : deeknow) this nice, very easy to use and free softphone : PhonerLite.

Official site and download

The offical English web page is :

http://www.phonerlite.de/index_en.htm

PhonerLite is the lighter version of Phoner. It shares most of the code but with a (much) lighter interface in order to save resources. It was using 8Mo of RAM on my Windows XP while idle which is much lower than the idle XLite which was using up to 32Mo.

The donwload page is :

http://www.phonerlite.de/download_en.htm

If you download the ZIP file, you don’t need to do any installation (just don’t mess with the DLL); you can start using the phone by double clicking on PhonerLite.exe .

Screenshot and a quick review

It does all the necessary thing : easy control of settings and options (sound settings, codecs, security, network settings) … Regarding the phone features : call on hold (that’s the little hand near the green ‘pick up’ button), redial (the yin-yang like image below the hang up button), do not disturb, conference calls , call forwarding (I didn’t test these 2 features so far), logs, phone book …

Another thing I like about it is that it provides live statistics about the line such as Jitter and packet loss for instance. If you are having call quality issues, you can easily check if it is due to your network or broadband connection.

I have not tested it for long enough to judge it properly but the voice quality seemed nice; as nice as you can expect it to be on a softphone.

My SIP Switch Configuration

Now here are the steps to configure it with My SIP Switch:

Note that if you are behind a firewall, you may want to enter a STUN server (for instance : stun.xten.com).

Enter your My SIP Switch username and password. The authentication name is not necessary.

Select your audio devices.

Confirm and start My SIP Switching

This article is a bit off topic on this blog but I found the tool so powerful and easy to use that I wanted to share this.

I needed to start a computer running Windows XP SP2. The former user had a password on his account (account with admin rights) and I had no way to contact him.

I used a tool which allows editing or resenting the password of any of the user account on the computer.
That doesn’t recover the password (at least I don’t think so), that allows to reset or to allocate a new one. According to their website it works for Windows NT versions : 2000, XP, Vista.

Here is the link: http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

Basically you simply need to

• Download the CD image (.iso file) and burn is as an image on a CD (or DVD) (it also work with a floppy disk)
• Boot from that CD (you may need to modify the boot sequence in the Bios)
• You will be asked a few question like which partition is Windows installed on, where is the registery with the SAM file … (some value are added by default and if your configuration is “classic”, they will be the correct ones)
• Change or reset the password for a user (you can retreive the list of users)
• Save the changes and restart the computer

You need less that 10 minutes all together. That’s brillant.

That also makes you realise a few security threats on a windows computer : get the boot sequence to start from the hard drive first (that will prevent anyone trying to boot your computer with that kind of software and change your password) and also lock the Bios changes with a password so that anyone cannot change the boot sequence.

Guillaume

Since December 07, My SIP Switch can be installed on your own server or local computer with .Net (ie: Mono for Linux or Windows XP or Vista)

The news was given by Aaron on My SIP Switch forum : Local version of My SIP Switch

Here are a few tips to install it on Windows

You can download the zip file here :

http://www.mysipswitch.com/downloads/sipswitch-v0.2.zip

To check for newer versions, please, refer to the news section of My SIP Switch forum

The 1st thing to mention is that there is a readme file inside the zip with already many information about the installation and configuration.

The aim of this article is to provide further help for less technical people.

You’ll see that there are 2 ways of using My SIP Switch on your own : directly in the Windows command (console app) or as a Windows service.

CONSOLE:

The console application is probaby easier to put in place but if you close the window then My SIP Switch stops … so that can be unconveniant. That can be a 1st step in order to test and to get more familiar with My SIP Switch.

You simply need to edit the XML configuration files and the sipswitchconsole.exe.config file.

You need to modify the local loop IP (127.0.0.1) by your server IP (it can be a private IP, for instance, 192.168.1.1). Note that for localsipsockets and registrarrealms I also used my private IP.

SERVICE:

If you want to install it as a Windows service, you’ll find information in the readme file. Here are a few tips that came to my mind when I tried to install it myself on my laptop, running Windows XP:

Installation :

InstallUtil.exe is not in the system32 directory, so you’ll need to specify its path when trying to install the service; for instance:
E:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\InstallUtil.exe “C:\_PATH_\sipswitchservice.exe”
Replace “C:\_PATH_” by the complete path to the .exe to install.

If after the installation you don’t see it in the list of windows service; look at the installation logs. If you have an error like : ” The inner exception System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception was thrown with the following error message: Access Denied”.  Make sure you have admin rights on your computer.  If the error persists, try to install it on a different directory (a simpler one, for instance : C:\Program Files\mysipswicth)

Configuration:
You need to modify the local loop IP (127.0.0.1) by your server IP (it can be a private IP, for instance, 192.168.1.1). Note that for localsipsockets and registrarrealms I also used my private IP.

Database / XML files :

You can use either of these technologies to store your data. Although note that XML are much simpler to edit (you simply need a text editor) than the DB (where you’ll need a PostgreSQL application such as PGAdminlll)

If you prefer to use a DB, then you can use the .sql file in the zip. Remember to uncomment the database related lines in the config file and to comment the lines related to XML files.

Then, to start the service: go to Start > right click on “My Compter” > Manage > Services and Applications. Select My SIP Switch and right-click to open the properties.

In the tab called “Connexion”, you need to make sure that the account using the service as administrator rights : either enter the admin login / password or use the “local system” if you are the admin your computer. If you don’t set this you’ll notice strange error messages when you’ll try to run the service saying that the connection to such or such address:port was not granted because of insuffisant rights.

All these should help you to get started properly

If you need further help, please, do not hesitate to post in My SIP Switch forum : http://www.mysipswitch.com/forum/index.php

By Guillaume

I’ve had a request to provide some documentation for the code used for the mysipswitch service (downloadable from CodePlex) however there is no documentation. We’ve focused on getting a usable service up and running and providing new features rather than a concentrating too much on a developer friendly code base. The reasoning behind that approach is that there are more people interested in using the software than there are developing with it (plus I am absolutely terrible at providing external documentation for code. UML diagrams and code commenting fine but external reference documents are like pulling teeth). This post is a designed to provide a very very brief overview of the code used in the development of the sipswitch to provide a starting point.

The code is written in C# and uses Microsoft’s .Net Framework v3 libraries. It is possible to disable one part of the sipswitch (Sys.Http which provides web services from the SIP Server) and run it on Linux but for full functionality Windows is required. The main assemblies are:

• BlueFace.Sys - General purpose assembly that contains commonly used functionality such as database access, cryptographic initialisation, string formatting etc,
• BlueFace.VoIP.Net - The engine room of the SIP functionality. This assembly handles all the parsing and processing of SIP Transactions, SIP Requests and SIP Responses and all the pieces within them such as SIP URIs, SIP Headers, SIP Parameters etc. The intention is that this assembly implements the SIP RFC however at 269 pages in length it’s a serios RFC with lots of side references and conformance is guaranteed to be incomplete,
• BlueFace.VoIP.Net.App - This assembly contains more specialised functionlaity that builds on top of the SIP stack in BlueFace.VoIP.Net or compliments it. Most of the functionality in this assembly is incomplete and is either a placeholder or minimum functionality to achieve a specific task. An example is the SDP.cs class which partially implements a Session Description Protocol parser. To date the only information that has been needed from the SDP has been the IP address and port number so no real effort has been put into parsing all the other information in an SDP message,
• BlueFace.VoIP.SIPServerCores - This assembly implements the different SIP Servers in use by mysipswitch which are:
  • SIP Registrar
  • SIP Registration Agent (client to register with 3rd party SIP Providers)
  • SIP Stateful Proxy
  • Telnet Monitoring Console
  • STUN Server
  • NAT KeepAlive Server
• SIPSwitch.Service - The Windows Service (can also be compiled as a Console application) that is the mysipswitch dameon and which controls the starting and wiring up of each of the individual servers.

That’s the main assemblies described. The simplest type of SIP Server is a stateless SIP Proxy and the SIP stack makes this a very easy job. I’ll aim to provide some example code for that in the next post as it’s also a good way to demonstrate the use of the code without requiring an in depth understanding of the inner workings which is of course what all time strapped developers are after!

Regards,

Aaron