Mobicents Team Meeting 2010 @ Antalya, Turkey

Saturday, October 16, 2010 em 00:28

Yes, this paradisal venue (Alva Donna Resort & SPA at Belek, Antalya, Turkey) was where the 2010 Mobicents Face-to-Face Meeting was held, 24th - 30th September. Thanks to Eduardo Martins for arranging the trip, it was the best _ever_ for several reasons: It was the first time we managed to gather all the team together, ranging from a couple of hours travelling to some doing it in a day and half! But I'm sure it worth every minute!

Also, this was the first (and certainly not the last!) time we had customers and community users joining our technical meetings and providing the most valuable feedback for our products and their roadmap. It's a whole new perspective and for that, we can only say: Thank You!


It was also the one we had more entertainment available, from the first day rafting to the resort's nightly shows, several swimming pools, sliders, jetski, bowling, etc etc. It sure was a lot of fun!


But we had to work too (a lot :-)) between all this fun. We had presentations for the main Mobicents projects, mostly regarding the past, present and future of each project, ie, what we achieved in the last year, the current status of each project in terms of stability, performance and features and the plans for the upcoming year. Also we had some project-wide presentations, such as clustering which affects most of the projects.



For my main project, Mobicents Diameter, we had a crash course to give a quick introduction to what it is all about and it's role in the telco world (something to be explored here too, promised!) presented by Bartosz Baranowski and after, I did the presentation regarding the achievements and roadmap. In sum, this was a great year for Mobicents Diameter:

  • 8 Releases, 3 of them being major ones, with important features introduced (JBoss 5 support; JAIN SLEE 1.1 Resource Adaptors; High-Availability/Fault-Tolerant Stack and Resource Adaptors)
  • Management Console based on RHQ
  • 400% Performance improvement ( > 800 requests/second )
  • Complete User Guide Documentation
  • .. and some more!
We had quite a good set of achievements, I would say! But we have a lot more to achieve in the future. We are focusing on the stability and performance of our solution, extend the testsuite and interop with other Diameter products to ensure complete compliance with the protocol and applications. We have defined two different goals:
  • Continue work on the 1.x.y series, providing it with stability and better performance;
  • Start a 2.x.y series, where we intend to change several internal components as well as redesigning the API to make it more easy and intuitive to work with, probably also providing a high-level abstraction to the Diameter protocol to provide simple charging. This is something to be discussed among the community to understand the direction to follow
You can find the Diameter presentation here.

Regarding the other project where I participate, Mobicents JAIN SLEE, we had also an excellent year of work, with great achievements. You can read more in detail on Eduardo's post.

So, this was it. It was a blast! Counting the days for the next meeting, looking forward to see even more community users joining us!

The Greatest (Vladimir and Tom are missing :-\) -- Görüşmek üzere! (See you soon, in Turkish ;-))



User Survey: Help improving Mobicents Platform!

Thursday, September 16, 2010 em 20:25
As you (should) know a Mobicents Face-to-Face meeting is about to happen (you can still join us!) and we would like to have some input from our community on what Mobicents products they are using, what they think about them, what they would like to have in future versions, etc.

It's a great chance for you to be able to participate in the future of Mobicents platform, don't miss it! How can you do that? By simply filling a quick 5-minute survey where you can make your opinion count and affect the roadmaps!

Without further delays, head your browser to the survey at https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHk2ZGVQZ21zSG9sbXVJRUJzX2dNaXc6MQ

Please provide information as accurate and detailed as possible.

Thanks for your time and support!
  The Mobicents Team

Installing Jopr/RHQ and Mobicents JAIN SLEE (or Diameter) Plugin

Wednesday, July 21, 2010 em 02:05
As it seems that some users don't find the task of installing and configuring Mobicents JAIN SLEE / Diameter Management consoles as plugins for Jopr/RHQ easy, I've decided to make a blog post explaining how to do it.

But if an image worths more than 1.000 words, how many words can a video worth? :) Hopefully, a lot, because I've just recorded one that I hope it helps to better understand how it should be done.

Still, I will point the main actions to be executed and the time they occur at the video, for faster reference.

Here it is, right from the Mobicents Channel @ Vimeo:

Installing Jopr/RHQ and Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.x Plugin (click to watch in HD)

  1. [00:00] Download RHQ Server from http://www.rhq-project.org/ and Unzip rhq-server-3.0.0.zip to any directory of your choice;
  2. [00:50] In a terminal, go to "rhq-server-3.0.0/bin" inside the extracted folder and run "rhq-server.[bat|sh] console", depending on your OS;
  3. [01:30] Go to http://127.0.0.1:7080/ and install the server (don't forget to select your database);
  4. [03:15] Login with default credentials (rhqadmin/rhqadmin), go to Downloads and Download the "Agent Installer";
  5. [04:00] In a new terminal, go to the directory where the Agent Installer was downloaded and issue the command "java -jar rhq-enterprise-agent-3.0.0.jar --install" to install it;
  6. [04:35] In the same terminal go to rhq-agent/bin (where it was installed) and run "rhq-agent.[bat|sh] --clean" (use --clean to make sure you will use a fresh configuration). Default values should be fine;
  7. [05:30] In the web interface, go to Administration > System Configuration > Plugins, click "Add" and browse to the Mobicents JAIN SLEE / Diameter Plugin location and click "Upload". When done, click "Scan for Updates";
  8. [07:45] If not yet running, start yout JAIN SLEE / Diameter Server;
  9. [09:30] In the RHQ Agent terminal, issue "plugins update" to update the agent plugins (download the JAIN SLEE / Diameter plugin to the agent);
  10. [11:10] Now that the plugins are updated, and with the JAIN SLEE / Diameter Server running, in the Agent terminal issue the "discovery" command to find new resources;
  11. [11:35] In the web interface, go to Overview > Auto Discovery Queue, locate the Server, check it and click "Import"
  12. [12:45] Still at the webpage, head to Resources > Servers. Click on the server entry to manage it. Enjoy!

Simple, isn't it ? Hope it is now.. It's time to have fun, managing and monitoring Mobicents Servers via Jopr/RHQ ;-)

For details on what you can do with these plugins, please refer to the documentation found in the binaries releases of the servers.

Mobicents Diameter 1.1.2.GA: Introducing Diameter Jopr Plugin

Friday, February 26, 2010 em 11:49
We've just released a new spin for Mobicents Diameter, v1.1.2.GA.

It happened on 21st of February and along with the usual bug fixing and improvements, there's a great addition to the suite: The Mobicents Diameter Jopr Plugin.

Jopr is an enterprise management solution which provides administration, monitoring, alerting, operational control and configuration in an enterprise setting with fine-grained security and an advanced extension model.

The Mobicents Diameter Jopr Plugin provides the following functionalities:

  • Stack configuration and management
    • Provides means of changing stack parameters, such as various timeout values, duplicate protection, accept undefined peers, thread pools size, etc.;
    • Start/Stop stack, Enable/Disable validation
  • Local peer configuration and statistics
    • Allows change of local peer IP Address and URI, Realm name, supported Application-Ids, etc.;
    • Real time statistics regarding memory usage
  • Network Peers management and statistics
    • Provides ability to add and remove Network Peers;
    • Statistics regarding requests/answer sent and/or received (total and per minute), Average time for message processing, Number of messages waiting on queue, number of messages failed to send/receive, etc.
  • Realms configuration and management
    • Allow runtime realm configuration, ie, change realm name, Peers list, Application Ids, etc.;
    • Add and remove Realms

All these functionalities plus the added value by Jopr, which provides availability for each component (Stack, Local Peer, Network Peers and Realms), alert configuration, intuitive graphs and some more cool and intuitive features makes this a great companion for the Diameter suite!

Regarding installation and configuration of Jopr and the plugin, while we are working at the documentation for it, you can follow JAIN SLEE Jopr Plugin User Guide (Installing Jopr and Mobicents JAIN SLEE Plugin chapter) since it's the exact same procedure.

Here are some screenshots of the plugin in action:

 

 

 

Enjoy!