This is a set of coordinated releases intended to begin the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI; for the reasons why this is being done, please see:

http://blogs.digium.com/2008/05/19/zaptel-project-being-renamed-to-dahdi/

The list of packages released today includes:

• zaptel 1.2.27
• zaptel 1.4.12
• dahdi-linux 2.0.0-rc3
• dahdi-tools 2.0.0-rc2
• dahdi-linux-complete 2.0.0-rc3+2.0.0-rc2
• asterisk 1.4.22-rc3
• asterisk 1.6.0-rc4
• asterisk-addons 1.6.0-rc1

All of these packages are available on http://downloads.digium.com in their respective directories. Detailed information about each package release is included below.

=== zaptel-1.2.27 ===

This will be the final release of Zaptel made from the 1.2 release branch. This release includes a number of bug fixes and other improvements, most notably compatibility with the 2.6.26 and 2.6.27
kernels and a fix for wctdm driver (for TDM400P cards) that corrects a problem introduced in 1.2.26 that caused FXO ports to not properly recognize incoming calls.

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/zaptel/releases/ChangeLog-1.2.27

=== zaptel-1.4.12 ===

This will be the final release of Zaptel made from the 1.4 release branch. This release includes a number of bugs fixes and other improvements, including the changes that are listed above for the Zaptel
1.2.27 release.

In addition, there are two major changes in this release:

– Support for the Digium TC400B transcoder card has been completely rewritten, and the API used by Asterisk (or any other application) to the card has been changed significantly. The result of this work is that the transcoder interface is more reliable and stable, and it supports variable-sized G.729 frames (including G.729B silence detection frames). However, that means that any Asterisk user using a TC400B who wants to upgrade to this version of Zaptel must *also* upgrade their version of
Asterisk to one of the releases included in this announcement; older versions of Asterisk will not be able to use the transcoder support in this release of Zaptel.

– To help users make the transition to DAHDI (and especially if they need to move back to Zaptel for some reason), this version of Zaptel contains installation steps that will *uninstall* the important parts of DAHDI if they are present on the system during the ‘make install’ step. This will allow a user to ‘switch back’ to Zaptel from DAHDI without having to manually uninstall any portions of DAHDI.

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/zaptel/releases/ChangeLog-1.4.12

=== dahdi-linux-complete-2.0.0-rc3+2.0.0-rc2 ===

This release combines dahdi-linux-2.0.0-rc3 and dahdi-tools-2.0.0-rc2 into a single download, one-package installation process, so that users who are installing DAHDI for the first time don’t have to download and install the dahdi-linux and dahdi-tools packages separately.

=== dahdi-linux-2.0.0-rc3 ===

This is the first release candidate of the DAHDI Linux kernel modules package, which replaces the kernel modules components of Zaptel. It contains all the functionality of Zaptel 1.4 plus many improvements, but also has some old (generally unsupported) functionality from Zaptel removed, including (but not limited to):

• Support for Linux 2.4.x kernels
• Support for devfs dynamic device filesystems
• The ‘torisa’ and ‘wcusb’ drivers

Information on upgrading from Zaptel to DAHDI can be found in the included UPGRADE.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/dahdi/linux/tags/2.0.0-rc3/UPGRADE.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/dahdi-linux/releases/ChangeLog-2.0.0-rc3

=== dahdi-tools-2.0.0-rc2 ===

This is the first release candidate of the DAHDI userspace tools package, which replaces the userspace components of Zaptel. It contains all the functionality of Zaptel 1.4 plus many improvements.

Information on upgrading from Zaptel to DAHDI can be found in the included UPGRADE.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/dahdi/tools/tags/2.0.0-rc2/UPGRADE.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/dahdi-tools/releases/ChangeLog-2.0.0-rc2

=== asterisk-1.4.22-rc3 ===

This release candidate includes a large number of bug fixes and also is the first release of Asterisk 1.4 that includes support for DAHDI, the package that is replacing Zaptel. This version of Asterisk can be built against *either* Zaptel or DAHDI, but since Zaptel 1.4.12 is the last release of Zaptel 1.4, users are encouraged to transition to DAHDI as soon as they can, so that they will be able to continue to receive bug fixes and other improvements.

Information on how the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI affects this Asterisk release can be found in the included Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.4.22-rc3/Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/ChangeLog-1.4.22-rc3

=== asterisk-1.6.0-rc4 ===

This release candidate marks the transition of the Asterisk 1.6 release branch from ‘beta’ status to ‘release candidate’ status, signifying that it is nearing final release. This version of Asterisk contains a large number of enhancements and improvements over Asterisk 1.4, which can be found in the included CHANGES file, and read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-rc4/CHANGES?view=co

*All* users who install this version of Asterisk are strongly encouraged to read the UPGRADE.txt file to learn about changes that affect compatibility with previous versions of Asterisk; this file can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-rc4/UPGRADE.txt?view=co

Information on how the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI affects this Asterisk release can be found in the included Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-rc4/Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/ChangeLog-1.6.0-rc4

=== asterisk-addons-1.6.0-rc1 ===

This release candidate marks the transition of the Asterisk-Addons 1.6 release branch from ‘beta’ status to ‘release candidate’ status, signifying that it is nearing final release. This version of
Asterisk-Addons contains a Bluetooth device channel driver called chan_mobile, as well as a number of smaller improvements to existing modules.

*All* users who install this version of Asterisk-Addons are strongly encouraged to read the UPGRADE.txt file to learn about changes that affect compatibility with previous versions of Asterisk-Addons; this
file can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk-addons/tags/1.6.0-rc1/UPGRADE.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/ChangeLog-addons-1.6.0-rc1

=== ===

Thank you for your continued support of the Asterisk project!

Asterisk 1.6.1 will have the ability to share device state between servers using a new module, res_ais, which uses the SAForum AIS to share events between Asterisk servers. It has been tested with and developed against the openais implementation of AIS.

In addition to writing res_ais, this effort consisted of a lot of improvements to the Asterisk core to understand distributed device state. My next step is to complete the changes to pbx_dundi to allow Asterisk servers to use DUNDi to share events, as well. This should provide the best results for servers that want to share state information across the Internet, as opposed to servers in a local cluster on a high speed LAN.

Commits related to merging this code into Asterisk 1.6:

http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-commits/2008-June/023363.html
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-commits/2008-June/023371.html
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-commits/2008-June/023387.html

http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-commits/2008-June/023396.html

http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-commits/2008-June/023400.html

One of the things that I have been working with off and on is a new event API for Asterisk. Most of the current infrastructure was written almost a year ago. However, just recently, I extended this system to be able to allow device states to be shared within a cluster of Asterisk servers.

The current system for distributed events is designed for a high speed LAN. However, I also have plans to extend this to DUNDi so that it can be used withina DUNDi network, as well.

If you are interested in this work, I would appreciate any help with testing. I have documented how to set it up and how I used some custom states to verify the functionality.

To download the code:

$ svn co http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/team/russell/events asterisk-events


For information on setup and testing, check out this document.

UPDATE

This functionality has been merged into Asterisk and will be available in Asterisk 1.6.1. Instead of testing this branch, please test 1.6.1.

To download the code:

$ svn co http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/branches/1.6.1 asterisk-1.6.1


For information on setup and testing, check out this document.

This effort is broken down to two main parts:

1. Internal Event API
2. Event Distribution Methods

Internal Event API

The first phase of this effort is to come up with a generic API for generating events inside of Asterisk. This is different than the Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI). The code for generating Asterisk manager events is very specific to the manager interface and does not lend itself toward using this information anywhere else in Asterisk.

I consider this part of the project to already be pretty mature. There is a generic, binary encoded event publish and subscribe API in Asterisk trunk. I have already converted some things to use it, such as Voicemail message waiting information (more on this later!), but a more aggressive effort to convert things to use this API will be done after phase 2 has matured.

Here is the header file for this API if you are curious.

Event Distribution Methods

This part is a little bit more tricky than the first. The project here is to take the binary encoded events that are passed around using the internal event API and distribute them between a distributed network of Asterisk servers. This part is still very much in development.

I have completed a module to implement one method of distributing events. I set it up and verified that voicemail message waiting state was distributed and available between multiple servers. This approach works great for some network scenarios, but not for others.

Details

I have more to say on the specifics of what I’m working on. I will be making follow up posts on this topic to describe details of the event distribution methods I come up with as well as what features are being converted to take advantage of these new underlying features. I can say now that the areas that I have been working on so far are sharing voicemail and device state (presence) information.

I hope that people will find this work useful as it progresses.