MOBICENTS MEETING @ ANTALYA

I've got a wonderful story to tell. It all started around beginning of August when some discussions started about a Mobicents team meeting. The main criteria for the choice of the place where it would take was that Oleg, our Russian colleague that we have never met before for several reasons, would have to be present. At that time we didn't know if we would have budget to meet, because of the so called financial crises, so we decided to go for a location that would not be too expensive to stay and to travel to. The place chosen was Antalya, in Turkish riviera. Eduardo and his wife Diana made a terrific job on choosing the place. We stayed for a week in hotel Alva Donna in Belek, just outside Antalya, and it was superb. The budget was aprooved and we scheduled the meeting to take place in the last week of September, from Friday 24 to Thusrday 30.

I flew with the Portuguese team (Eduardo and Alexandre) from Lisbon to Antalya. It was a fast trip, as we haven't been together for a while and have lot's of stuff to discussed. When we arrived at the Antalya airport Bartosz and Vladimir were waiting for us. We went together to the resort were we met the rest of the team (they were waiting for us at the bar, of course). Something great about this meeting was the fact that everybody was able to come (even Tom came all the way from Australia), and even some members of our beloved community made it despite the short notice. There was no meeting on the first day, it was reserved for team building. We went rafting in the mountains nearby.

Sunday was the first day that we actually did some work. Those presentations were for Red Hat employees only and we discussed business strategies and the productization process. Although QA was not in the agenda, I did a brief 30 minutes presentation. The topics covered were the following:

• Achievemnts (This includes 10 JBCP releases during last year plus most of community releases, the work done in test tools like the report tools and smartfrog setups to test distributed scenarios)
• Mobicents on Hudson (What tests were added during last year, and what services are being provided by Hudson)
• Current Issues (Mostly the lack of resorts)
• Future work (JBCP5, improve HA tests, create an independent project to host the developed tools)

From there on, the presentations were shared with the members of the community present. They were kind to introduce us to their projects, and explain how they are using Mobicents to deliver new and innovative services. It was great for us to understand what are their needs and to know that our work is the foundation for what these guys do. The Mobicents team members were also able to present what was accomplished in the last year, and the list is big. Whenever we make such balances on what has been done in one year period, it always amazes me how such a small team can do so many great things. Just to name the most important, Jain-SLEE has gone HA, and with it most of it's resource adaptors. Media server was rewritten almost from scratch to deliver better quality and performance. Sip-Servlets has now many more features, especially in HA. Diameter project is now an important reality within Mobicents, and the most important diameter applications were developed. In SS7 the progress is also impressive, as several legacy protocols are now supported. If we look inside of each project the list goes on and on.

Although the presentations are the reason we meet, we try to spend most of the time with fun and games. Being in a 5 star resort was great for that. We never felt the need to leave the resort, so many were the activities that we could do. No time wasted driving around town. For instance, the launch break was always spent inside the gorgeous pool with just a quick meal in the buffet restaurant before going back. At night, after dinner, there was always a top notch show for the guests and from that on we just kept on partying until we can. I am really proud of not falling asleep during the presentations. I want to share with everybody some pictures that try to show a little bit of the good times we had. You can access them at http://picasaweb.google.pt/lbbbarreiro/MobicentsMeetingAntalya.

The usual suspects: Selah, Pavel, Eduardo, Raziya, Amit, Ivelin, Bartosz, Oleg, Luis, Jean, Alexandre
We searched for Vladimir but couldn't find him to take the picture with us.

Have fun,

VMSTAT REPORT TOOL - AN EASY WAY TO MONITOR A SERVER UNDER LOAD

Mobicents Jain-SLEE 2.0.0.BETA2 was just released a few days ago. If you missed the announcement shame on you, go get it right now. I was really looking forward this release and that was just what I did.

So, I downloaded it, then installed sip resource adaptor and sip11-loadtest-with-dialogs and had fun with it. Development team already told me that it was fast, that it could handle twice the call rate and that it was stable. I thought of seeing it by myself and I can now say that they were right. I just posted my test report to mobicents-public mailing list.

This is all very nice, but what I want to talk about in this post is this tool that monitors the load of the server under load. I am very happy with the tool that parses the stat file that the SIPp load generator outputs and shows it in a beautiful report, but it was not complete because it doesn't show things like Memory, I/O or CPU usage. Now we can see those parameters because I just developed a similar tool that parses the output of the vmstat command.


I was inspired by some code that I saw that parsed the output of this command. Since the structure of the data is not much different than the stat file, I thought of modifying the sipp report tool and created the vmstat report tool in a few hours.

Since this was done in such a hurry, between some test runs, there are still some things that I'm improving. I would like to have some averages so it would be easier to compare results on longer tests. I would also like to group different graphs of the same components, like CPU and Memory, to understand better how these resources are being used when the server is under load. I haven't committed the tool to Mobicents SVN yet, but I will.

Although this reports are great, they are very limited, and the only reason why I put it up was that is was easy to do. The report only shows the state of the whole system, while what would be ideal was to have a report of the Java VM process where Mobicents is running only. That could also be done, and it's a thing that I considered in the past, but it would require a greater effort to accomplish, so for now it's another idea on my drawer of ideas.

All in all, I believe that it's a nice addition to our collection of test and report tools, and that it will certainly be used in future load tests to monitor the server load while it runs. Now we will also be able to compare the resource consumption of a server between releases.

Data is nothing if we can't understand it. For me, that am a little dumb, there is nothing better to make me understand things than a good graph, or set of graphs. That is the main reason why I develop this tools, and although there s still a lot of stuff that I don't understand, I'm getting there one graph at a time.

Have fun,

MOBICENTS ALL 1.2.1.GA RELEASED

The Mobicents team is happy to announce a new release of the mobicents-all bundle, that includes an updated version of most of mobicents components. The last release, mobicents-all-1.2.0.GA, was made in February, so it was about time to update it.

There aren't many new and exciting features, these are still being developed and can be tried out in the latest beta releases of the different projects. Still, there are new diameter RAs (CCA, Rf, Ro, Sh-server) and the popular diameter-OpenIMS example is also included. The updated versions include several bug fixes and some performance improvements as well. Documentation is included and is more extent than in the previous version.

The main product versions are the following:

• Mobicents JAIN-SLEE 1.2.6.GA
• Mobicents SIP Servlets 1.0
• Mobicents SIP Presence Service 1.0.0.BETA5
• Mobicents Media Server 1.0.3.GA
• Mobicents Diameter v1.0.1.GA
• Mobicents SIP Load Balancer 1.0.BETA7

So go ahead, download the binary form SourceForge and read the release notes. We are waiting for your feedback on mobicents-public google group.

Have fun,

MOBICENTS MEETING @ BRNO

Once every year, the mobicents team gets together to discuss the state of the mobicents nation, and in the time between, to party around. Since the previous location doesn't bring us the best memories, this year we chosed Brno in Czech Republic to be our meeting point. The decision was a little bit influenced by Pavel, with promises of great team building activities.

Unfortunately the Portuguese members of the team had trouble to get there, and missed the first day (and the first night). Once we got there we tried to compensate the time lost. Each day after the meetings all the fun begun. On Tuesday there was this football mach Portugal & Poland vs. Rest of the World where the Rest of the World team lost in the last minute with a goal scored with the hand (sorry guys). On Wednesday we went for a kart race that everybody enjoyed, not only because of the speed but also because of the crashes. We also had great dinners every day (I really appreciated the Czech cuisine) and after that we would go out in Brno's night. Surprisingly, no one got late for the meetings on the next day.

Regarding the work, we covered what we achieved last year, and the list is pretty amazing:

• Jain-SLEE is certified 2.0
• Sip-Servlets has reached GA
• Media server 1.0 has reached GA, 2.0 is under way.
• Diameter has also become GA and increased the number of supported applications
  
• We also did great progresses on Documentation and Produtization
  

The road maps we discussed for the projects are also very ambitious:

• Fault Tolerance and High Availability for both Jain-SLEE and Sip-Servlets
• Video and SS7 support on media server
• Management (cross-platform)
• IMS components on top of Jain-SLEE (HSS, X-CSCF)
• Improve the Jain-SIP stack
  

For my task inside the project, Quality Assurance, the main achievements were the releases of Mobicents-all 1.2.0 and 2 releases of JBoss Communication Platform during the last year, as well as a bunch of other GA releases for the individual projects. We also agreed on a new process to have more Mobicents-all releases with less effort. In the last month we we granted 2 new dedicated servers on QA lab that will ease the load testing of our projects. On the hudson front, the coverage now is more extent and we agreed that the developers will keep an eye on the warnings gave by the findbugs jobs.

For the near future we plan to cover the FT/HA features on the lab, first with a simple setup, and hopefully evolving to a more realistic one. We also plan to increase our coverage of media tests, as well as the coverage on protocols other than SIP. Interrupting these tasks will be a never ending stream of releases for the different projects and each one needs to get trough a final review, making sure that is not broken.

We are all looking for the next year meeting already. If you know some place where we could have lots of fun, please leave a note and we will consider it. Pictures of the good times we had this year can be found on http://picasaweb.google.pt/lbbbarreiro/MobicentsMeetingBrno.

The usual suspects: Jean, Ivelin, Amit, Luis, Bartosz, Vladimir, Alexandre, Eduardo
Our good host Pavel couldn't attend to this dinner.

Have fun,

HELLO WORLD

There is no other way to start anything other than an hello, and so here am I saying hello and welcoming you to this new space that I'm creating.

The reasons why I'm creating yet another blog are several. I don't plan to post a lot, but I'll try to do it with quality, both in shape and content. I'll try to come up with interesting material, not only about my professional life and other technical issues, but also about other stuff that I may find relevant.

More about me can always be found in my personal home page, http://barreirao.pt.tc/, if you can read and understand Portuguese. WhatDog lives on.

Have fun,