[Freeswitch-users] Question about sharing conference between servers

[Michael Collins]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Tina Martinez <tina at a2unlimited.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have spent the past couple of weeks toying around with FS to evaluate the
> possibility of using it for a large scale conference server for our
> organization.  The plan is to have several FS servers initiate calls to
> participants and connect them together, but not have to transfer all of the
> calls to one server supporting the conference.  My problem is that I do not
> see a simple way to link the servers together.  Has anyone done anything
> like this, or know of a way to create a connection between servers without
> an actual caller on the line?  I started to go down a path of registering a
> soft-phone on each machine and place a call those extensions prior to
> initiating the conference call -- then connecting, but that feels like a
> kludge.
>
> Any thoughts, suggestions or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
> T


Tina,

Welcome to the FreeSWITCH community! I'm pretty sure that FS can do what you
need. My first question to you is this: do envision having some sort of call
control mechanism, like a script or something that knows which callers to
connect to and which ones to put into conferences, etc.? The reason I ask is
that controlling calls using the event-socket allows for great power and
flexibility.

As for "connecting" the FS servers you have several options. You can use
ACLs to allow the servers to call each other via SIP without needing
authentication. You could also use gateways to allow FS machines to do SIP
registrations with each other. (I suppose it depends on your exact needs,
but ACLs are pretty easy and clean.) Once you have FS machines able to dial
each other then it's pretty much a matter of configuring your dialplans to
route the calls. You can create conferences on the fly so that part is easy.
The tricky part will be controlling how to link the conferences together,
although FS has a handy API to add a conference member to an existing
conference by dialing out. (See
http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_conference#API_Reference)

Let's say you have two servers, FS_A and FS_B. Each server can dial the
other and each server has a conference running, named FS_A_Conf and
FS_B_Conf, respectively. You can have either conference dial the other
server. For example, from the FS_A command line:

conference FS_A_Conf dial
{originate_timeout=30}sofia/internal/3900 at FS_B.IP.Address 1111 FS_A_Conf

Where 3900 is an extension set up in FS_B's dialplan to route to FS_B_Conf
and "1111 FS_A_Conf" are the caller ID number and name that FS_B should
receive from FS_A.

You still need to figure out other things like if you want the ability to
"break apart" the two conferences after they've been connected together,
etc. This is definitely doable but you'll need to handle the call control
stuff some how.

HTH,
MC
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freeswitch.org/pipermail/freeswitch-users/attachments/20090812/2dfbcd05/attachment-0002.html