<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Tina Martinez <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tina@a2unlimited.com" target="_blank">tina@a2unlimited.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<p>Hello,<br>
</p><p>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.</p><p>Any thoughts, suggestions or guidance would be greatly appreciated.</p>T
</blockquote><br>Tina,<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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 <a href="http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_conference#API_Reference" target="_blank">http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_conference#API_Reference</a>)<br>
<br>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:<br>
<br>conference FS_A_Conf dial {originate_timeout=30}sofia/internal/3900@FS_B.IP.Address 1111 FS_A_Conf<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>HTH,<br>MC<br></div>