Tag Archives: SIP

Tales from the Trenches – SMS Data Coding Scheme 0

The Data Coding Scheme (DCS or TP-DCS) header in an SMS body indicates what encoding is used in that message.

It means if we’re using UCS-2 (UTF16) special characters like Emojis etc, in in our message, the phone knows to decode the data in the message body using UTF, because the Data Coding Scheme (DCS) header indicates the contents are encoded in UTF.

Likewise, if we’re not using any fancy characters in our message and the message is encoded as plain old GSM7, we set set the DCS to 0 to indicate this is using GSM7.

From my experience, I’d always assumed that DCS0 (Default) == GSM7, but today I learned, that’s not always the case. Some SMSc entities treat DCS0 as Latin.

Let me explain why this is stupid and why I wasted a lot of time on this.

We can indicate that a message is encoded as Latin by setting the DCS to 0x03:

We cannot indicate that the message is encoded as GSM7 through anything other than the default alphabet (DCS 0).

Latin has it’s own encoding flag, if I wanted the message treated as Latin, I’d indicate the message encoding is Latin in the DCS bit!

I spent a bunch of time trying to work out why a customer was having issues getting messages to subscribers on another operator, and it turned out the other operator treats messages we send to them on SMPP with DCS0 as Latin encoding, and then cracks the sads when trying to deliver it.

The above diff shows the message we send (Right), and the message they dry to deliver (left).

Well, lesson learned…

Creating a Fixed Line IMS subscriber in PyHSS

I generally do this with Python or via the Swagger UI for the Web UI, but here’s how we can create a fixed-line IMS subscriber in PyHSS, so we can register it with a softphone, without using EAP-AKA.


Firstly we create the AuC object for this password combo.

curl -X 'PUT' \
'http://10.97.0.36:8080/auc/' \
-H 'accept: application/json' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
"ki": "yoursippassword123",
"opc": "",
"amf": "8000",
"sqn": "1"
}'

Get back the AuC ID from the JSON body, we’ll use this to provision the Sub:

 "auc_id": 110,

Next we create the subscriber, the speeds will be 0 as there is no data on the service, but we will add an default APN so the validation passes:

curl -X 'PUT' \
'http://10.97.0.36:8080/subscriber/' \
-H 'accept: application/json' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
"default_apn": 1,
"roaming_rule_list": null,
"apn_list": "0",
"subscribed_rau_tau_timer": 600,
"msisdn": "123451000001",
"ue_ambr_dl": 0,
"ue_ambr_ul": 0,
"imsi": "001001000090001",
"nam": 2,
"enabled": true,
"roaming_enabled": null,
"auc_id": 110
}'

Alright, that’s the basics done, now we’ll create the IMS subscriber.

Provision it:

curl -X 'PUT' \
'http://10.97.0.36:8080/ims_subscriber/' \
-H 'accept: application/json' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
"pcscf_realm": null,
"scscf_realm": null,
"pcscf_active_session": null,
"scscf_peer": null,
"msisdn": "123451000001",
"pcscf_timestamp": null,
"sh_template_path": "default_sh_user_data.xml",
"msisdn_list": "123451000001",
"pcscf_peer": null,
"last_modified": "2024-04-25T00:33:37Z",
"imsi": "001001000090001",
"xcap_profile": null,
"ifc_path": "default_ifc.xml",
"sh_profile": "\n<!-- This container for the XCAP Data for the Subscriber -->\n<RepositoryData>\n <ServiceIndication>ApplicationServer</ServiceIndication>\n <SequenceNumber>0</SequenceNumber>\n <ServiceData>\n <!-- This is the actual XCAP Data for the Subscriber -->\n \n <!-- XCAP Default Template (no XCAP Data stored in Database) -->\n <simservs xmlns=\"http://uri.etsi.org/ngn/params/xml/simservs/xcap\" xmlns:cp=\"urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:common-policy\">\n <originating-identity-presentation active=\"true\" />\n <originating-identity-presentation-restriction active=\"true\">\n <default-behaviour>presentation-not-restricted</default-behaviour>\n </originating-identity-presentation-restriction>\n <communication-diversion active=\"true\">\n <!-- No Answer Time -->\n <NoReplyTimer>20</NoReplyTimer>\n <cp:ruleset>\n <!-- Call Forward All Rule -->\n <cp:rule id=\"rule0\">\n <cp:conditions>\n <communication-diverted />\n </cp:conditions>\n <cp:actions>\n <forward-to>\n <target>sip:[email protected]</target>\n </forward-to>\n </cp:actions>\n </cp:rule>\n <!-- Call Forward Not Registered Rule -->\n <cp:rule id=\"rule1\">\n <cp:conditions>\n <not-registered />\n </cp:conditions>\n <cp:actions>\n <forward-to>\n <target>sip:[email protected]</target>\n </forward-to>\n </cp:actions>\n </cp:rule>\n <!-- Call Forward No Answer Rule -->\n <cp:rule id=\"rule2\">\n <cp:conditions>\n <no-answer />\n </cp:conditions>\n <cp:actions>\n <forward-to>\n <target>sip:[email protected]</target>\n </forward-to>\n </cp:actions>\n </cp:rule>\n <!-- Call Forward Busy Rule -->\n <cp:rule id=\"rule3\">\n <cp:conditions>\n <busy />\n </cp:conditions>\n <cp:actions>\n <forward-to>\n <target>sip:[email protected]</target>\n </forward-to>\n </cp:actions>\n </cp:rule>\n <!-- Call Forward Unreachable Rule -->\n <cp:rule id=\"rule4\">\n <cp:conditions>\n <not-reachable />\n </cp:conditions>\n <cp:actions>\n <forward-to>\n <target>sip:[email protected]</target>\n </forward-to>\n </cp:actions>\n </cp:rule>\n </cp:ruleset>\n </communication-diversion>\n \n <incoming-communication-barring active=\"true\">\n <cp:ruleset>\n <cp:rule id=\"rule0\">\n <cp:conditions />\n <cp:actions>\n <allow>true</allow>\n </cp:actions>\n </cp:rule>\n </cp:ruleset>\n </incoming-communication-barring>\n\n <outgoing-communication-barring active=\"false\">\n </outgoing-communication-barring>\n </simservs>\n\n </ServiceData>\n \n</RepositoryData>\n",
"pcscf": null,
"scscf": null,
"scscf_timestamp": null
}'

And with that we’re done,

We can now register 001001000090001 at our IMS, with password yoursippassword123 which has the MSISDN / phone number 123451000001.

Easy!

Libpython3.11 problems with Kamailio on Ubuntu 22.04

I run Ubuntu on my desktop and I mess with Kamailio a lot.

Recently I was doing some work with KEMI using Python, but installing the latest versions of Kamailio from the Debian Repos for Kamailio wasn’t working.

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 kamailio-python3-modules : Depends: libpython3.11 (>= 3.11.0) but 3.11.0~rc1-1~22.04 is to be installed

Kamailio’s Python modules expect libpython3.11 or higher, but Ubuntu 22.04 repos only contain the release candidate – not the final version:

root@amanaki:/home/nick# apt-cache policy libpython3.11
libpython3.11:
  Installed: 3.11.0~rc1-1~22.04
  Candidate: 3.11.0~rc1-1~22.04
  Version table:
 *** 3.11.0~rc1-1~22.04 500
        500 http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Luckily the deadsnakes PPA to the rescue!

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get purge kamailio
sudo apt --fix-broken install
sudo apt-get upgrade
apt-get install kamailio kamailio-python3-modules

And done!

CGrateS – AttributeS

The docs describe AttributeS as a Key-Value-Store, but that’s probably selling it short – You can do some really cool stuff with AttributeS, and in this post, we’re going to learn about using AttributeS to transform stuff.

Note: Before we get started, I’d suggest copying this config file to use for testing.

Let’s look at a really basic example, where we add some data into AttributeS, match based on Account in CGrateS, and get back that data.

Let’s look at how this would look on the API:

{
    "method": "APIerSv2.SetAttributeProfile",
    "params": [{
        "Tenant": "cgrates.org",
        "ID": "ATTR_Nick_Key_Value_Example",
        "Contexts": ["*any"],
        "FilterIDs": [
            "*string:~*req.Account:1234"
        ],
        "Attributes": [
            {
            "FilterIDs": [],
            "Path": "*req.ExampleKey",
            "Type": "*constant",
            "Value": "ExampleValue"
            }
        ],
        "Blocker": False,
        "Weight": 10

    }],
}

So what are we doing in this API call?

Well, for starters we’re calling the SetAttributeProfile endpoint, this is where we go to create / update Attribute Profiles, but in this case, because we’re hitting it for the first time with this ID, we’re creating a new entry called “ATTR_Nick_Key_Value_Example“, this will match any Contexts (more on them later) where the FilterIDs is a string, where the request Account, is equal to 1234.

Let’s run this against the CGrateS API and take a look at the result:

import cgrateshttpapi
import pprint

CGRateS_Obj = cgrateshttpapi.CGRateS('localhost', 2080)

SetAttributeProfile = {
    "method": "APIerSv2.SetAttributeProfile",
    "params": [{
        "Tenant": "cgrates.org",
        "ID": "ATTR_Nick_Key_Value_Example",
        "Contexts": ["*any"],
        "FilterIDs": [
            "*string:~*req.Account:1234"
        ],
        "Attributes": [
            {
            "FilterIDs": [],
            "Path": "*req.ExampleKey",
            "Type": "*constant",
            "Value": "ExampleValue"
            }
        ],
        "Blocker": False,
        "Weight": 10
    }],
}
result = CGRateS_Obj.SendData(SetAttributeProfile)
pprint.pprint(result)

result = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method":"AttributeSv1.ProcessEvent",
                               "params":[
                                   {"Tenant":"cgrates.org",
                                    "Event":{"Account":"1234"},"APIOpts":{}}]})
pprint.pprint(result)

All going well you should have got the following back:

{'method': 'AttributeSv1.ProcessEvent', 'params': [{'Tenant': 'cgrates.org', 'Event': {'Account': '1234'}, 'APIOpts': {}}]}
{'error': None,
 'id': None,
 'result': {'APIOpts': {},
            'AlteredFields': ['*req.ExampleKey'],
            'Event': {'Account': '1234', 'ExampleKey': 'ExampleValue'},
            'ID': '',
            'MatchedProfiles': ['cgrates.org:ATTR_Nick_Key_Value_Example'],
            'Tenant': 'cgrates.org',
            'Time': None}}

This tells us we matched the Attribute with the ID ATTR_Nick_Key_Value_Example, and inside Event we can see that ExampleKey was added with value ExampleValue.

Okay, you’re saying, well what was the point of that?

Well, what if as a key in the attributes, we had the password for the SIP account, which we passed to our SIP switch (Kamailio, FreeSWITCH or Asterisk for example), and used that to authenticate?

Let’s see how that would look:

{
    "method": "APIerSv2.SetAttributeProfile",
    "params": [{
        "Tenant": "cgrates.org",
        "ID": "ATTR_Nick_Password_Example",
        "Contexts": ["*any"],
        "FilterIDs": [
            "*string:~*req.Account:1234"
        ],
        "Attributes": [
            {
            "FilterIDs": [],
            "Path": "*req.SIP_password",
            "Type": "*constant",
            "Value": "sosecretiputitonthewebsite"
            }
        ],
        "Blocker": False,
        "Weight": 10
    }],
}

Now if the CGrateS Agent for your SIP Switch, includes the *attributes flag, and the call is coming from 1234, we’ll get back a key called “SIP_password” with the value “sosecretiputitonthewebsite”, which you can use to auth the SIP account.

We can also return multiple AttributeS, for example, we created two Attributes (ATTR_Nick_Password_Example and ATTR_Nick_Key_Value_Example) which match on the account 1234. This means we’ll get back the SIP Password from ATTR_Nick_Password_Example and the key:value we set in ATTR_Nick_Key_Value_Example:

{'method': 'AttributeSv1.ProcessEvent', 'params': [{'Tenant': 'cgrates.org', 'Event': {'Account': '1234'}}]}
{'error': None,
 'id': None,
 'result': {'APIOpts': {},
            'AlteredFields': ['*req.SIP_password', '*req.ExampleKey'],
            'Event': {'Account': '1234',
                      'ExampleKey': 'ExampleValue',
                      'SIP_password': 'sosecretiputitonthewebsite'},
            'ID': '',
            'MatchedProfiles': ['cgrates.org:ATTR_Nick_Password_Example',
                                'cgrates.org:ATTR_Nick_Key_Value_Example'],
            'Tenant': 'cgrates.org',
            'Time': None}}

The order can be controlled by the Weight flag in the attribute, and if you want to stop matching any other AttributeS rules after the current Attribute, you can set the Blocker=True flag when you create/update the Attribute.

Okay, I hear you saying, that’s all well and good, I can add arbitrary key/values to stuff. Here endeth the lesson right?

Well not quite, because we can add key/values, but we can also rewrite variables using AttributeS.

Let’s imagine we’ve got 3 phone numbers (DIDs) associated with an account inside CGrateS, for example’s sake let’s say we have 12340001, 12340002 and 12340003, and we want any calls from these numbers to be billed to a CGrateS account called “NickTest1234”.

Our SIP switch doesn’t need to know anything about “NickTest1234”, just the 3 DIDs it can use to call out from your SIP stack. But to do this, we’d need CGrateS to transform any events from these DIDs to replace the Account value inside CGrateS, with NickTest1234.

Let’s see how that would look:

{'method': 'APIerSv2.SetAttributeProfile', 'params': [{'Tenant': 'cgrates.org', 'ID': 'ATTR_Calling_NickTest1234_12340001', 'Contexts': ['*any'], 'FilterIDs': ['*string:~*req.Account:12340001'], 'Attributes': [{'Path': '*req.Account', 'Type': '*constant', 'Value': 'NickTest1234'}], 'Weight': 0}], 'id': 1}

{'method': 'APIerSv2.SetAttributeProfile', 'params': [{'Tenant': 'cgrates.org', 'ID': 'ATTR_Calling_NickTest1234_12340002', 'Contexts': ['*any'], 'FilterIDs': ['*string:~*req.Account:12340002'], 'Attributes': [{'Path': '*req.Account', 'Type': '*constant', 'Value': 'NickTest1234'}], 'Weight': 0}], 'id': 2}

{'method': 'APIerSv2.SetAttributeProfile', 'params': [{'Tenant': 'cgrates.org', 'ID': 'ATTR_Calling_NickTest1234_12340003', 'Contexts': ['*any'], 'FilterIDs': ['*string:~*req.Account:12340003'], 'Attributes': [{'Path': '*req.Account', 'Type': '*constant', 'Value': 'NickTest1234'}], 'Weight': 0}], 'id': 3}

In the example code to go with this I’ve put together a simple for loop to add these – You can find the code on Github (link at the bottom).

So with these defined, let’s try and rate something, we’ll add a default Charger, and add an SMS balance, before simulating an SMS where the account is set to 12340003:

#Define default Charger
print(CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method":"APIerSv1.SetChargerProfile","params":[{"Tenant":"cgrates.org","ID":"DEFAULT","FilterIDs":[],"AttributeIDs":["*none"],"Weight":0}]}))

#Add an SMS Balance
print(CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method":"ApierV1.SetBalance","params":[{"Tenant":"cgrates.org","Account":"Nick_Test_123","BalanceType":"*sms","Categories":"*any","Balance":{"ID":"SMS_Balance_1","Value":"100","Weight":25}}],"id":13}))

import uuid
import datetime
now = datetime.datetime.now()
result = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({
    "method": "CDRsV2.ProcessExternalCDR",
    "params": [
        {
            "OriginID": str(uuid.uuid1()),
            "ToR": "*sms",
            "RequestType": "*pseudoprepaid",
            "AnswerTime": now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"),
            "SetupTime": now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"),
            "Tenant": "cgrates.org",
            #This is going to be transformed to Nick_Test_123 by Attributes
            "Account": "12340003",
            "Usage": "1",
        }
    ]
})
pprint.pprint(result)

Right, so all going well, here’s what you should see in the CDRs table:

Bingo! Despite the fact the Account in the ProcessExternalCDR was set to 12340003, and had no mention of “NickTest1234”, CGrateS transformed it to NickTest1234.

How did that happen? Well, inside our cgrates.json file we have set the cdrs and chargers modules to have a link to Attributes, which means that when we call CDRs or Chargers modules via the API, these will in turn bounce the data through AttributesS for any transformations.

This means we don’t need to run AttributeSv1.ProcessEvent ourselves, when we call CDRsV2.ProcessExternalCDR, the CDRs module will call AttributeSv1.ProcessEvent for us.

We can actually see this happening, using ngrep, which as you work more with CGrateS, is a tool you’ll get very familiar with, let’s take a peek:

sudo ngrep -t -W byline port 2012 -d lo

Now if we run the CDRsV2.ProcessExternalCDR again, we’ll see the CDRs module has called Attributes for us:

Boom, there it is, same as we ran, but it’s being handled by CGrateS for us.

If you look carefully you’ll see the context in the API request is set to “*cdrs”, this means the CDRs module is calling Attributes.

When we define each of our Attributes, as we did earlier in the post, we can set what contexts they are valid in, for example we may want to apply the transformation when called by CDRs, but not other modules, you can restrict that when you define the Attribute by setting “Contexts”: [“*cdrs”].

Okay, so we’ve done some account replacement, what else can we do?

Well, let’s look at some other use cases,

Here in Australia we’ve got a few valid dialing formats, you could dial E.164 format (Numbers look like: +61212341234), 0NSN format (Numbers look like: 02 1234 1234) or NSN format (Numbers look like: 1234 1234 assuming you’re in the 03 area code yourself).
If we want to define all our Destinations in E.164 format, we’ll need to to normalise the format using AttributeS, so the numbers always come as E.164.

Let’s give it a whirl with a static translation:

{
    "method": "APIerSv2.SetAttributeProfile",
    "params": [{
        "Tenant": "cgrates.org",
        "ID": "ATTR_0NSN_to_E164_Single",
        "Contexts": ["*any"],
        "FilterIDs": [
            "*string:~*req.Subject:0212341234"
        ],
        "Attributes": [
            {
            "FilterIDs": [],
            "Path": "*req.Subject",
            "Type": "*constant",
            "Value": "61212341234"
            }
        ],
        "Blocker": False,
        "Weight": 10
    }],
}

Now this will work, if we simulate an Event to AttributeS with the Subject 0212341234, it’ll get transformed by AttributeS to 61212341234.

The issue here is probably pretty obvious, the only matches one number, if we dial 0212341235 this all falls apart.

Enter our old friend Regex.

For starters, we’ll change the FilterIDs to match where the Account is NickTest7, this way we can set the rules on a per CGrateS account basis.

{
    "method": "APIerSv2.SetAttributeProfile",
    "params": [{
        "Tenant": "cgrates.org",
        "ID": "ATTR_0NSN_to_E164_02_Area_Code",
        "Contexts": ["*any"],
        "FilterIDs": [
            "*string:~*req.Account:NickTest7"
        ],
        "Attributes": [
            {
            "FilterIDs": [],
            "Path": "*req.Subject",
            "Type": "*variable",
            "Value": "~*req.Subject:s/^0(\d{1})(\d{8})$/61${1}${2}/"
            },
            {
            "FilterIDs": [],
            "Path": "*req.Subject",
            "Type": "*variable",
            "Value": "~*req.Subject:s/^(\d{8})$/612${1}/"
            },
        ],
        "Blocker": False,
        "Weight": 10
    }],
}

And then under AttributeS we’ve defined a rule to replace anything matching the 0NSN regex, to strip the first digit and append a 61, to put it in E.164 format, and in SN format as the second entry.

We can now test this out:

{'method': 'AttributeSv1.ProcessEvent', 'params': [{'Tenant': 'cgrates.org', 'Event': {'Account': 'NickTest7', 'Subject': '0312341234'}, 'APIOpts': {'*processRuns': 5, '*profileRuns': 5, '*subsys': '*sessions'}}]}
{'error': None,
 'id': None,
 'result': {'APIOpts': {'*processRuns': 5,
                        '*profileRuns': 5,
                        '*subsys': '*sessions'},
            'AlteredFields': ['*req.Subject'],
            'Event': {'Account': 'NickTest7', 'Subject': '61312341234'},
            'ID': '',
            'MatchedProfiles': ['cgrates.org:ATTR_0NSN_to_E164_02_Area_Code'],
            'Tenant': 'cgrates.org',
            'Time': None}}



{'method': 'AttributeSv1.ProcessEvent', 'params': [{'Tenant': 'cgrates.org', 'Event': {'Account': 'NickTest7', 'Subject': '12341234'}, 'APIOpts': {'*processRuns': 5, '*profileRuns': 5, '*subsys': '*sessions'}}]}
{'error': None,
 'id': None,
 'result': {'APIOpts': {'*processRuns': 5,
                        '*profileRuns': 5,
                        '*subsys': '*sessions'},
            'AlteredFields': ['*req.Subject'],
            'Event': {'Account': 'NickTest7', 'Subject': '61212341234'},
            'ID': '',
            'MatchedProfiles': ['cgrates.org:ATTR_0NSN_to_E164_02_Area_Code'],
            'Tenant': 'cgrates.org',
            'Time': None}}

And there you have it folks; our number format standardized.

We can combo / cascade AttributeS rules together, with the aid of the Weight and Blocker flags in the API.

Let’s imagine the 61212341234 number has been ported from Operator1 to Operator2, and the Destinations we’ve defined in CGrateS for this prefix are currently set to DST_Operator1.
But because this number has been ported we should use DST_Operator2, so we charge the Operator2, as this number has been ported.

This means we don’t need to duplicate destination definitions to show this number has been ported, as this will be updated as the call gets rated, so we just assign the Attribute to each ported number.

So let’s match where the Subject of the call is 61212341234 (even though we’re going to input the Subject as 12341234), and rewrite the Destination attribute to DST_Operator2:

{
    "method": "APIerSv2.SetAttributeProfile",
    "params": [{
        "Tenant": "cgrates.org",
        "ID": "ATTR_Ported_61212341234",
        "Contexts": ["*any"],
        "FilterIDs": [
            "*string:~*req.Subject:61212341234",
        ],
        "Attributes": [
            {
            "FilterIDs": [],
            "Path": "*req.Destination",
            "Type": "*constant",
            "Value": "DST_Operator2"
            },
        ],
        "Blocker": False,
        "Weight": 5
    }],
}

From the results we can see we matched two AttributeS rules, the first, ATTR_0NSN_to_E164_02_Area_Code reformatted the Subject of the call from 12341234 to 61212341234, then the updated Subject was passed through to ATTR_Ported_61212341234, which updated the Destination attribute to DST_Operator2.

{'method': 'AttributeSv1.ProcessEvent', 'params': [{'Tenant': 'cgrates.org', 'Event': {'Account': 'NickTest7', 'Subject': '12341234'}, 'APIOpts': {'*processRuns': 5, '*profileRuns': 5, '*subsys': '*sessions'}}]}
{'error': None,
 'id': None,
 'result': {'APIOpts': {'*processRuns': 5,
                        '*profileRuns': 5,
                        '*subsys': '*sessions'},
            'AlteredFields': ['*req.Subject', '*req.Destination'],
            'Event': {'Account': 'NickTest7',
                      'Destination': 'DST_Operator2',
                      'Subject': '61212341234'},
            'ID': '',
            'MatchedProfiles': ['cgrates.org:ATTR_0NSN_to_E164_02_Area_Code',
                                'cgrates.org:ATTR_Ported_61212341234'],
            'Tenant': 'cgrates.org',
            'Time': None}}

Hopefully this has helped you to dip a toe into the CGrateS AttributeS pool, and give you some ideas of what we can achieve inside AttributeS.

A complete working code & config is available on my Github here.

If you’re having issues, make sure you have loaded the config file, are running the latest version, and if in doubt (and not on a production system), this script will clear all the data for you so you can rule out anything interfering.

Android and Emergency Calling

In the last post we looked at emergency calling when roaming, and I mentioned that there are databases on the handsets for emergency numbers, to allow for example, calling 999 from a US phone, with a US SIM, roaming into the UK.

Android, being open source, allows us to see how this logic works, and it’s important for operators to understand this logic, as it’s what dictates the behavior in many scenarios.

It’s important to note that I’m not covering Apple here, this information is not publicly available to share for iOS devices, so I won’t be sharing anything on this – Apple has their own ecosystem to handle emergency calling, if you’re from an operator and reading this, I’d suggest getting in touch with your Apple account manager to discuss it, they’re always great to work with.

The Android Open Source Project has an “emergency number database”. This database has each of the emergency phone numbers and the corresponding service, for each country.

This file can be read at packages/services/Telephony/ecc/input/eccdata.txt on a phone with engineering mode.

Let’s take a look what’s in mainline Android for Australia:

You can check ECC for countries from the database on the AOSP repo.

This is one of the ways handsets know what codes represent emergency calling codes in different countries, alongside the values set in the SIM and provided by the visited network.

Tales from the Trenches: mode-set in AMR

This one was a bit of a head scratcher for me, but I’m always glad to learn something new.

The handset made a VoLTE call, and it’s SDP offer shows it can support AMR and AMR-WB:

        Media Attribute (a): rtpmap:116 AMR-WB/16000/1
        Media Attribute (a): fmtp:116 mode-set=0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8;mode-change-capability=2;max-red=220
        Media Attribute (a): rtpmap:118 AMR/8000/1
        Media Attribute (a): fmtp:118 mode-set=0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7;mode-change-capability=2;max-red=220
        Media Attribute (a): rtpmap:111 telephone-event/16000
        Media Attribute (a): fmtp:111 0-15

Okay, that’s pretty normal, I can see we have the mode-set parameter defined, which indicates what modes the handset supports for each codec.

In our problem scenario, the Media Gateway that the call was sent to responded with this SDP answer:

        Media Description, name and address (m): audio 24504 RTP/AVP 118 110
        Media Attribute (a): rtpmap:118 AMR/8000
        Media Attribute (a): fmtp:118 mode-set=7
        Media Attribute (a): rtpmap:110 telephone-event/8000
        Media Attribute (a): fmtp:110 0-15
        Media Attribute (a): ptime:20
        Media Attribute (a): sendrecv
        [Generated Call-ID: FA163E564B37-f4d-98f56700-735d25-65357ee0-9c488]

But we got an error about not available codecs and the call drops, what gives?

Both sides support AMR (Only the phone supports AMR-WB), and the Media Gateway, as the answerer, supports mode-set 7, which is supported by the UE, so we should be good?

Well, not quite:

If mode-set is specified, it MUST be abided, and frames encoded with modes outside of the subset MUST NOT be sent in any RTP payload or used in codec mode requests. If not present, all codec modes are allowed for the payload type.

RFC 4867 – RTP Payload Format for AMR and AMR-WB

Okay, I get it, the answerer (media gateway) only supports mode 7, but the UE supports all the modes, so we should be fine right?

Well, no.

Section 8.3.1 in the RFC goes on to say in the Offer-Answer Model Considerations:

The parameter [mode-set] is bi-directional, i.e., the restricted set applies to media both to be received and sent by the declaring entity. If a mode set was supplied in the offer, the answerer SHALL return the mode-set unmodified or reject the payload type. However, the answerer is free to choose a mode-set in the answer only if no mode-set was supplied in the offer for a unicast two-peer session.

And there is our problem, and why the call is getting rejected.

The Media Gateway (the answerer in this scenario) is sending back the mode-set it supports (7) but as the UE / handset (offerer) included the mode-set, the Media Gateway should either respond with the same mode set (if it supported all the requested modes) or reject it.

Instead we’re seeing the Media Gateway repond with the mode set, which it supports, which it should not do: The Media Gateway should either return the same mode-set (unmodified / unchanged) or reject it.

And boom, another ticket to another vendor…

Playing back AMR streams from Packet Captures

The other day I found myself banging my head on the table to diagnose an issue with Ringback tone on an SS7 link and the IMS.

On the IMS side, no RBT was heard, but I could see the Media Gateway was sending RTP packets to the TAS, and the TAS was sending it to the UE, but was there actual content in the RTP packets or was it just silence?

If this was PCM / G711 we’d be able to just playback in Wireshark, but alas we can’t do this for the AMR codec.

Filter the RTP stream out in Wireshark

Inside Wireshark I filtered each of the audio streams in one direction (one for the A-Party audio and one for the B-Party audio)

Then I needed to save each of the streams as a separate PCAP file (Not PCAPng).

Turn into AMR File

With the audio stream for one direction saved, we can turn it into an AMR file, using Juan Noguera (Spinlogic)’s AMR Extractor tool.

Clone the Repo from git, and then in the same directory run:

python3 pcap_parser.py -i AMR_B_Leg.pcap -o AMR_B_Leg.3ga

Playback with VLC / Audacity

I was able to play the file with VLC, and load it into Audacity to easily see that yes, the Ringback Tone was present in the AMR stream!

CGrateS MySQL Rounding Error

I put my rates in with a stack of decimal points, because accuracy matters!

But when I manually calculated the outputted costs associated with each transaction, I seemed to have some rounding errors.

So what was the issue?

The schema in MySQL was set to DECIMAL(10,4) which gives us 10 digits after the decimal point and 4 digits after.

A quick alter table and a reimport of the rates and I was on my way!

"alter table tp_rates modify column  rate DECIMAL(10,10);"

Lesson learned and hopefully of use to any other CGrateS users who may be using MySQL as a StoreDB.

FreeSWITCH Bridge Timers 101

A cheat sheet for anyone trying to control FreeSWITCH bridge behaviour if you’re trying to move calls around if not answered / responded to:

originate_timeout

How long to wait for any response to from the remote peer (100 TRYING, 180 RINGING, etc).

This is useful for knowing when to give up and try a different peer as this peer is dead.

originate_retries

How many times to retransmit the INVITE if no 100 TRYING / 180 RINGING is received.

Like originate_timeout, this is handy for giving up sooner when a peer is dead and moving onto others.

progress_timeout

How long we wait between sending the SIP INVITE before we get a 180/183 before we give up.

This is handy to find out if the remote end isn’t able to reach the endpoint you’re after (page the UE in a cellular context).

bridge_answer_timeout

How long do we wait between the INVITE and a 200 OK (Including RINGING) – This is useful for “no answer” timeouts.

If you want to know why a bridge failed, ie no answer timeout reached, error on the remote end, etc, we can see why with the following variable:

variable_last_bridge_hangup_cause: [PROGRESS_TIMEOUT]

Which will allow you to tell if it’s no answer or progress timeout to blame.

FreeSWITCH – Keep Call-ID the same on both legs of a Bridged Call

I needed to have both legs of the B2BUA bridge call through FreeSWITCH using the same Call-ID (long story), and went down the rabbit hole of looking for how to do this.

A post from 15 years ago on the mailing list from Anthony Minessale said he added “sip_outgoing_call_id” variable for this, and I found the commit, but it doesn’t work – More digging shows this variable disappears somewhere in history.

But by looking at what it changed I found sip_invite_call_id does the same thing now, so if you want to make both legs use the same Call-ID here ya go:

<action application="set" data="sip_invite_call_id=mycustomcallid"/>

Yeah, this post probably could’ve been a Tweet….

RTPengine – Installation & Configuration (Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04)

I wrote a post a few years back covering installing RTPengine on Ubuntu (14.04 / 18.04) but it doesn’t apply in later Ubuntu releases such as 20.04 and 22.04.

To make everyone’s lives easier; David Lublink publishes premade repos for Ubuntu Jammy (22.04) & Focal (20.04).

Note: It looks like Ubuntu 23.04 includes RTPengine in the standard repos, so this won’t be needed in the future.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:davidlublink/rtpengine
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install ngcp-rtpengine

The Ambient Capabilities in the systemctl file bit me,

Commenting out :

#AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_ADMIN CAP_SYS_NICE

In /lib/systemd/system/ngcp-rtpengine-daemon.service and then reloading the service and restarting and I was off and running:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart rtpengine

Getting it Running

Now we’ve got RTPengine installed let’s setup the basics,

There’s an example config file we’ll copy and edit:

vi /etc/rtpengine/rtpengine.conf

We’ll uncomment the interface line and set the IP to the IP we’ll be listening on:

Once we’ve set this to our IP we can start the service:

systemctl restart rtpengine

All going well it’ll start and rtpengine will be running.

You can learn about all the startup parameters and what everything in the config means in the readme.

Want more RTP info?

If you want to integrate RTPengine with Kamailio take a look at my post on how to set up RTPengine with Kamailio.

For more in-depth info on the workings of RTP check out my post RTP – More than you wanted to Know

Authenticating Fixed Line Subscribers into IMS

We recently added support in PyHSS for fixed line SIP subscribers to attach to the IMS.

Traditional telecom operators are finding their fixed line network to be a bit of a money pit, something they’re required to keep operating to meet regulatory obligations, but the switches are sitting idle 99% of the time. As such we’re seeing more and more operators move fixed line subs onto their IMS.

This new feature means we can use PyHSS to serve as the brains for a fixed network, as well as for mobile, but there’s one catch – How we authenticate subscribers changes.

Most banks of line cards in a legacy telecom switches, or IP Phones, don’t have SIM slots to allow us to authenticate, so instead we’re forced to fallback to what they do support.

Unfortunately for the most part, what is supported by these IP phones or telecom switches is SIP MD5 Digest Authentication.

The Nonce is generated by the HSS and put into the Multimedia-Authentication-Answer, along with the subscriber’s password and sent in the clear to the S-CSCF.

Subscriber with Password made up of all 1's MAA response from HSS for Digest-MD5 Auth

The HSS then generates the the Multimedia-Auth Answer, it generates a nonce (in the 3GPP-SIP-Authenticate / 609 AVP) and sends the Subscriber’s password in the 3GPP-SIP-Authorization (610) AVP in response back to the S-CSCF.

I would have thought a better option would be for the HSS to generate the Nonce and Digest, and then the S-CSCF to just send the Nonce to the Sub and compare the returned Digest from the Sub against the expected Digest from the HSS, but it would limit flexibility (realm adaptation, etc) I guess.

The UE/UA (I guess it’s a UA in this context as it’s not a mobile) then generates its own Digest from the Nonce and sends it back to the S-CSCF via the P-CSCF.

The S-CSCF compares the received Digest response against the one it generated, and if the two match, the sub is authenticated and allowed to attach onto the network.

IMS iFC – SPT Session Cases

Mostly just reference material for me:

Possible values:

  • 0 (ORIGINATING_SESSION)
  • 1 TERMINATING_REGISTERED
  • 2 (TERMINATING_UNREGISTERED)
  • 3 (ORIGINATING_UNREGISTERED

In the past I had my iFCs setup to look for the P-Access-Network-Info header to know if the call was coming from the IMS, but it wasn’t foolproof – Fixed line IMS subs didn’t have this header.

            <TriggerPoint>
                <ConditionTypeCNF>1</ConditionTypeCNF>
                <SPT>
                    <ConditionNegated>0</ConditionNegated>
                    <Group>0</Group>
                    <Method>INVITE</Method>
                    <Extension></Extension>
                </SPT>
                <SPT>
                    <ConditionNegated>0</ConditionNegated>
                    <Group>1</Group>
                    <SIPHeader>
                      <Header>P-Access-Network-Info</Header>
                    </SIPHeader>
                </SPT>                
            </TriggerPoint>

But now I’m using the Session Cases to know if the call is coming from a registered IMS user:

        <!-- SIP INVITE Traffic from Registered Sub-->
        <InitialFilterCriteria>
            <Priority>30</Priority>
            <TriggerPoint>
                <ConditionTypeCNF>1</ConditionTypeCNF>
                <SPT>
                    <ConditionNegated>0</ConditionNegated>
                    <Group>0</Group>
                    <Method>INVITE</Method>
                    <Extension></Extension>
                </SPT>
                <SPT>
                    <Group>0</Group>
                    <SessionCase>0</SessionCase>
                </SPT>             
            </TriggerPoint>

HOMER API in Python

We’re doing more and more network automation, and something that came up as valuable to us would be to have all the IPs in HOMER SIP Capture come up as the hostnames of the VM running the service.

Luckily for us HOMER has an API for this ready to roll, and best of all, it’s Swagger based and easily documented (awesome!).

(Probably through my own failure to properly RTFM) I was struggling to work out the correct (current) way to Authenticate against the API service using a username and password.

Because the HOMER team are awesome however, the web UI for HOMER, is just an API client.

This means to look at how to log into the API, I just needed to fire up Wireshark, log into the Web UI via my browser and then flick through the packets for a real world example of how to do this.

Homer Login JSON body as seen by Wireshark

In the Login action I could see the browser posts a JSON body with the username and password to /api/v3/auth

{"username":"admin","password":"sipcapture","type":"internal"}

And in return the Homer API Server responds with a 201 Created an a auth token back:

Now in order to use the API we just need to include that token in our Authorization: header then we can hit all the API endpoints we want!

For me, the goal we were setting out to achieve was to setup the aliases from our automatically populated list of hosts. So using the info above I setup a simple Python script with Requests to achieve this:

import requests
s = requests.Session()

#Login and get Token
url = 'http://homer:9080/api/v3/auth'
json_data = {"username":"admin","password":"sipcapture"}
x = s.post(url, json = json_data)
print(x.content)
token = x.json()['token']
print("Token is: " + str(token))


#Add new Alias
alias_json = {
          "alias": "Blog Example",
          "captureID": "0",
          "id": 0,
          "ip": "1.2.3.4",
          "mask": 32,
          "port": 5060,
          "status": True
        }

x = s.post('http://homer:9080/api/v3/alias', json = alias_json, headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + token})
print(x.status_code)
print(x.content)


#Print all Aliases
x = s.get('http://homer:9080/api/v3/alias', headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + token})
print(x.json())

And bingo we’re done, a new alias defined.

We wrapped this up in a for loop for each of the hosts / subnets we use and hooked it into our build system and away we go!

With the Homer API the world is your oyster in terms of functionality, all the features of the Web UI are exposed on the API as the Web UI just uses the API (something I wish was more common!).

Using the Swagger based API docs you can see examples of how to achieve everything you need to, and if you ever get stuck, just fire up Wireshark and do it in the Homer WebUI for an example of how the bodies should look.

Thanks to the Homer team at QXIP for making such a great product!

Failures in cobbling together a USSD Gateway

One day recently I was messing with the XCAP server, trying to set the Call Forward timeout. In the process I triggered the UE to send a USSD request to the IMS.

Huh, I thought, “I wonder how hard it would be to build a USSD Gateway for our IMS?”, and this my friends, is the story of how I wasted a good chunk of my weekend trying (and failing) to add support for USSD.

You might be asking “Who still uses USSD?” – The use cases for USSD are pretty thin on the ground in this day and age, but I guess balance query, and uh…

But this is the story of what I tried before giving up and going outside…

Routing

First I’d need to get the USSD traffic towards the USSD Gateway, this means modifying iFCs. Skimming over the spec I can see the Recv-Info: header for USSD traffic should be set to “g.3gpp.ussd” so I knocked up an iFC to match that, and route the traffic to my dev USSD Gateway, and added it to the subscriber profile in PyHSS:

  <!-- SIP USSD Traffic to USSD-GW-->
        <InitialFilterCriteria>
            <Priority>25</Priority>
            <TriggerPoint>
                <ConditionTypeCNF>1</ConditionTypeCNF>
                <SPT>
                    <ConditionNegated>0</ConditionNegated>
                    <Group>1</Group>
                    <SIPHeader>
                      <Header>Recv-Info</Header>
                      <Content>"g.3gpp.ussd"</Content>
                    </SIPHeader>
                </SPT>                
            </TriggerPoint>
            <ApplicationServer>
                <ServerName>sip:ussdgw:5060</ServerName>
                <DefaultHandling>0</DefaultHandling>
            </ApplicationServer>
        </InitialFilterCriteria>

Easy peasy, now we have the USSD requests hitting our USSD Gateway.

The Response

I’ll admit that I didn’t jump straight to the TS doc from the start.

The first place I headed was Google to see if I could find any PCAPs of USSD over IMS/SIP.

And I did – Restcomm seems to have had a USSD product a few years back, and trawling around their stuff provided some reference PCAPs of USSD over SIP.

So the flow seemed pretty simple, SIP INVITE to set up the session, SIP INFO for in-dialog responses and a BYE at the end.

With all the USSD guts transferred as XML bodies, in a way that’s pretty easy to understand.

Being a Kamailio fan, that’s the first place I started, but quickly realised that SIP proxies, aren’t great at acting as the UAS.

So I needed to generate in-dialog SIP INFO messages, so I turned to the UAC module to generate the SIP INFO response.

My Kamailio code is super simple, but let’s have a look:

request_route {

        xlog("Request $rm from $fU");

        if(is_method("INVITE")){
                xlog("USSD from $fU to $rU (Emergency number) CSeq is $cs ");
                sl_reply("200", "OK Trying USSD Phase 1");      #Generate 200 OK
                route("USSD_Response"); #Call USSD_Response route block
                exit;
        }
}

route["USSD_Response"]{
        xlog("USSD_Response Route");
        #Generate a new UAC Request
        $uac_req(method)="INFO";
        $uac_req(ruri)=$fu;     #Copy From URI to Request URI
        $uac_req(furi)=$tu;     #Copy To URI to From URI
        $uac_req(turi)=$fu;     #Copy From URI to To URI
        $uac_req(callid)=$ci;   #Copy Call-ID
                                #Set Content Type to 3GPP USSD
        $uac_req(hdrs)=$uac_req(hdrs) + "Content-Type: application/vnd.3gpp.ussd+xml\r\n";
                                #Set the USSD XML Response body
        $uac_req(body)="<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
        <ussd-data>
                <language value=\"en\"/>
                <ussd-string value=\"Bienvenido. Seleccione una opcion: 1 o 2.\"/>
        </ussd-data>";
        $uac_req(evroute)=1;    #Set the event route to use on return replies
        uac_req_send();         #Send it!
}

So the UAC module generates the 200 OK and sends it back.

“That was quick” I told myself, patting myself on the back before trying it out for the first time.

Huston, we have a problem – Although the Call-ID is the same, it’s not an in-dialog response as the tags aren’t present, this means our UE send back a 405 to the SIP INFO.

Right. Perhaps this is the time to read the Spec…

Okay, so the SIP INFO needs to be in dialog. Can we do that with the UAC module? Perhaps not…

But the Transaction Module ™ in Kamailio exposes and option on the ctl API to generate an in-dialog UAC – this could be perfect…

But alas real life came back to rear its ugly head, and this adventure will have to continue another day…

Update: Thanks to a kindly provided PCAP I now know what I was doing wrong, and so we’ll soon have a follow up to this post named “Successes in cobbling together a USSD Gateway” just as soon as I have a weekend free.

Kamailio Bytes: Adding Prometheus + Grafana to Kamailio

I recently fell in love with the Prometheus + Grafana combo, and I’m including it in as much of my workflow as possible, so today we’ll be integrating this with another favorite – Kamailio.

Why would we want to integrate Kamailio into Prometheus + Grafana? Observability, monitoring, alerting, cool dashboards to make it look like you’re doing complicated stuff, this duo have it all!

I’m going to assume some level of familiarity with Prometheus here, and at least a basic level of understanding of Kamailio (if you’ve never worked with Kamailio before, check out my Kamailio 101 Series, then jump back here).

So what will we achieve today?

We’ll start with the simple SIP Registrar in Kamailio from this post, and we’ll add on the xhttp_prom module, and use it to expose some stats on the rate of requests, and responses sent to those requests.

So to get started we’ll need to load some extra modules, xhttp_prom module requires xhttp (If you’d like to learn the basics of xhttp there’s also a Kamailio Bytes – xHTTP Module post covering the basics) so we’ll load both.

xHTTP also has some extra requirements to load, so in the top of our config we’ll explicitly specify what ports we want to bind to, and set two parameters that control how Kamailio handles HTTP requests (otherwise you’ll not get responses for HTTP GET requests).

listen=tcp:0.0.0.0:9090
listen=tcp:0.0.0.0:5060
listen=udp:0.0.0.0:5060

http_reply_parse=yes
tcp_accept_no_cl=yes

Then where you load all your modules we’ll load xhttp and xhttp_prom, and set the basic parameters:

loadmodule "xhttp.so"
loadmodule "xhttp_prom.so"

# Define two counters and a gauge
modparam("xhttp_prom", "xhttp_prom_stats", "all")

By setting xhttp_prom module to expose all stats, this exposes all of Kamailio’s internal stats as counters to Prometheus – This means we don’t need to define all our own counters / histograms / gauges, instead we can use the built in ones from Kamailio. Of course we can define our own custom ones, but we’ll do that in our next post.

Lastly we’ll need to add an event route to handle HTTP requests to the /metrics URL:

event_route[xhttp:request] {
	xlog("Got a request!");
	xlog("$ru");
	$var(xhttp_prom_root) = $(hu{s.substr,0,8});
	if ($var(xhttp_prom_root) == "/metrics") {
			xlog("Called metrics");
			prom_dispatch();
			xlog("prom_dispatch() called");
			return;
	} else
		xhttp_reply("200", "OK", "text/html",
        		"<html><body>Wrong URL $hu</body></html>");
}

Restart, and browse to the IP of your Kamailio instance (mine is 10.01.23) port 9090 /metrics and you’ll get something like this:

Kamailio metrics endpoing used by Prometheus

That my friends, is the sort of data that Prometheus gobbles up, so let’s point Prometheus at it and see what data we get back.

Over on my Prometheus server I’ve edited /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml to target our new Prometheus endpoint.

  - job_name: "kamailo"
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["10.0.1.23:9090"]  
    honor_timestamps: false

So how can we see this data? Well first off if we log into Prometheus we can see the data flowing in:

If we throw some SIP REGISTER traffic at our Kamailio instance and check on the kamailio_registrar_accepted_regs stat we can see our registrations.

After a few clicks in Grafana we can run some graphs for this data too:

So that’s it, Kamailio’s core stats are now exposed to Prometheus, and we can render this information in Grafana.

There’s a copy of the full code used here available in the Github, and in our next post we’ll look at defining our own metrics in Kamailio and then interacting with them.

SMS-over-IP Message Efficiency – K

Recently I read a post from someone talking about efficiency of USSD over IMS, and how crazy it was that such a small amount of data used so much overhead to get transferred across the network.

Having built an SMSc a while ago, my mind immediately jumped to SMS over IMS as being a great example of having so much overhead.

If we’re to consider sending the response “K” to a text message, how much overhead is there?

SMS PDU containing the message “K”

I’m using a common Qualcomm based smartphone, and here’s the numbers I’ve got from Wireshark when I send the message:

Transport Ethernet Header – 14 Bytes
Transport IP Header – 20 Bytes
Transport UDP Header – 8 Bytes
Transport GTP Header – 12 Bytes
User IP Header – 20 Bytes
IPsec ESP Header (For Um interface protection) – 22 Bytes
Encapsulated UDP Header – 8 Bytes
SIP Headers – 707 Bytes
SMS Header – 16 Bytes
SMS Message Body “K” – 1 Byte

Overall SIP, ESP, GTP and Transport PCAP for SIP MESSAGE

That seems pretty bad in terms of efficiency, but let’s look at how that actually works out:

This means our actual message body makes up just 1 byte of 828 bytes, or 0.12% of the size of the overall payload.

Even combined with the SMS header (which contains all the addressing information needed to route an SMS) it’s still just on 2% of the overall message.

So USSD efficiency isn’t great, but it’s not alone!

Get all the FreeSWITCH Folder Paths

Thanks to it’s reliability, I find I go long periods of time without needing to do anything on FreeSWITCH.

But every now and then I log into a system and I can’t find the path I’m looking for, where do the recordings get stored?

The CDR storage location?

Here’s a simple trick to show the directory paths for a FreeSWITCH instance:

fs_cli -x 'global_getvar'| grep _dir

This will output all the paths you could possibly want:

nick@fs-131:~$ fs_cli -x 'global_getvar'| grep _dir
base_dir=/usr
recordings_dir=/var/lib/freeswitch/recordings
sounds_dir=/usr/share/freeswitch/sounds
conf_dir=/etc/freeswitch
log_dir=/var/log/freeswitch
run_dir=/var/run/freeswitch
db_dir=/var/lib/freeswitch/db
mod_dir=/usr/lib/freeswitch/mod
htdocs_dir=/usr/share/freeswitch/htdocs
script_dir=/usr/share/freeswitch/scripts
temp_dir=/tmp
grammar_dir=/usr/share/freeswitch/grammar
fonts_dir=/usr/share/freeswitch/fonts
images_dir=/var/lib/freeswitch/images
certs_dir=/etc/freeswitch/tls
storage_dir=/var/lib/freeswitch/storage
cache_dir=/var/cache/freeswitch
data_dir=/usr/share/freeswitch
localstate_dir=/var/lib/freeswitch

Saved me a lot of poking around, hopefully it’ll make others lives easier too.

CGrateS in Baby Steps – Part 4 – Rating Calls

In our last few posts we got CGrateS setup in order to have rates and tariffs in the system, so we can price a call.

Where we ended we were able to use the APIerSv1.GetCost method to get the cost of a call, and today, we’re going to actually create some rated CDRs.

So again this will be done through the API, using the CDRsV1.ProcessExternalCDR method.

So let’s give it a whirl:

#Add a CDR
print("Testing call..")
cdr = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method": "CDRsV1.ProcessExternalCDR", "params": [ { \
"Direction": "*out",
    "Category": "call",
    "RequestType": "*raw",
    "ToR": "*monetary",
    "Tenant": "cgrates.org",
    "Account": "1002",
    "Subject": "1002",
    "Destination": "61411111",
    "AnswerTime": "2022-02-15 13:07:39",
    "SetupTime": "2022-02-15 13:07:30",
    "Usage": "181s",
    "OriginID": "API Function Example"
    }], "id": 0})
pprint.pprint(cdr)

So the output of this, you may notice returns “Partially Executed” in the output, that’s no good.

{'method': 'CDRsV1.ProcessExternalCDR', 'params': [{'Direction': '*out', 'Category': 'call', 'RequestType': '*raw', 'ToR': '*monetary', 'Tenant': 'cgrates.org', 'Account': '1002', 'Subject': '1002', 'Destination': '61411111', 'AnswerTime': '2022-02-15 13:07:39', 'SetupTime': '2022-02-15 13:07:30', 'Usage': '181s', 'OriginID': 'API Function Example'}], 'id': 0}
OrderedDict([('id', 0), ('result', None), ('error', 'PARTIALLY_EXECUTED')])

So what’s going on here?

Well, there’s another concept I haven’t introduced yet, and that’s ChargerS, this is a concept / component we’ll dig into deeper for derived charging, but for now just know we need to add a ChargerS rule in order to get CDRs rated:

#Define Charger
print(CGRateS_Obj.SendData({
    "method": "APIerSv1.SetChargerProfile",
    "params": [
        {
            "Tenant": "cgrates.org",
            "ID": "DEFAULT",
            'FilterIDs': [],
            'AttributeIDs' : ['*none'],
            'Weight': 0,
        }
    ]   }   ))   
#Set Charger
print("GetChargerProfile: ")
GetChargerProfile = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "ApierV1.GetChargerProfile", "params": [{"TPid": "cgrates.org", "ID" : "DEFAULT"}]})
print("GetChargerProfile: ")
pprint.pprint(GetChargerProfile)

Now if we try rating the CDR again we should get a successful output:

{'method': 'CDRsV1.ProcessExternalCDR', 'params': [{'Direction': '*out', 'Category': 'call', 'RequestType': '*raw', 'ToR': '*monetary', 'Tenant': 'cgrates.org', 'Account': '1002', 'Subject': '1002', 'Destination': '6141111124211', 'AnswerTime': '2022-02-15 13:07:39', 'SetupTime': '2022-02-15 13:07:30', 'Usage': '181s', 'OriginID': 'API Function Example'}], 'id': 0}
OrderedDict([('id', 0), ('result', 'OK'), ('error', None)])

Great, so where did the CDR go?

Well, if you’ve got CDR storage in StoreDB enabled (And you probably do if you’ve been following up until this point), then the answer is a MySQL table, and we can retrive the data with:

sudo mysql cgrates -e "select * from cdrs \G"

For those of you with a bit of MySQL experience under your belt, you’d be able to envisage using the SUM function to total a monthly bill for a customer from this.

Of course we can add CDRs via the API, and you probably already guessed this, but we can retrive CDRs via the API as well, filtering on the key criteria:

#Get CDRs
cdrs = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method": "ApierV1.GetCDRs", "params": [ { \
"Direction": "*out",
   "Tenants": ["cgrates.org"],
   "Accounts": ["1002"],
    "TimeStart": "2022-02-14 13:07:39",
    "TimeEnd": "2022-02-16 13:07:39",
    "Limit": 100
    }], "id": 0})
pprint.pprint(cdrs)

This would be useful for generating an invoice or populating recent calls for a customer portal.

Maybe creating rated CDRs and sticking them into a database is exactly what you’re looking to achieve in CGrateS – And if so, great, this is where you can stop – but for many use cases, there’s a want for an automated solution – For your platform to automatically integrate with CGrateS.

If you’ve got an Asterisk/FreeSWITCH/Kamailio or OpenSIPs based platform, then you can integrate CGrateS directly into your platform to add the CDRs automatically, as well as access features like prepaid credit control, concurrent call limits, etc, etc.
The process is a little different on each of these platforms, but ultimately under the hood, all of these platforms have some middleware that generates the same API calls we just ran to create the CDR.

So far this tutorial has been heavy on teaching the API, because that’s what CGrateS ultimately is – An API service.

Our platforms like Asterisk and Kamailio with the CGrateS plugins are just CGrateS API clients, and so once we understand how to use and interact with the API it’s a breeze to plug in the module for your platform to generate the API calls to CGrateS required to integrate.

You can find all the code used in today’s lesson in the GitHub repo for this tutorial series.

Kamailio Bytes – Extracting SDP Parameters with Kamailio

So the other day I needed to extract the IP and Port parameters from an SDP body – Not the whole line mind, but the values themselves.

As with so many things in Kamailio, there’s a lot of ways to achieve an outcome, but here’s how I approached this problem.

Using the SDPops module we can get a particular line in the SDP, for example, we can get the media line with:

#Get SDP line starting with m= and put it into AVP $avp(mline)
sdp_get_line_startswith("$avp(mline)", "m=")
#Print value of $avp(mline)
xlog("m-line: $avp(mline)\n");

This gets us the line, but now we need to extract the data, in the example from the screenshot the M line has the value:

m=audio 4002 RTP/AVP 8 101

But we only want the port from the M line.

This is where I’ve used the Kamailio Dialplan module and regex to extract the port from this line.

With a fairly simple regex pattern, we can get a group match for the Port from the m= line.

So I took this regular expression, and put it into the Kamailio Dialplan database with dialplan ID 400 for this example:

INSERT INTO `dialplan` VALUES (4,400,10,1,'m=audio (\\d*)',0,'m=audio (\\d*)','\\1','SDP M Port Stripper');

Now using Dialplan ID 400 we can translate an inputted m= SDP line, and get back the port used, so let’s put that into practice:

        if(sdp_get_line_startswith("$avp(mline)", "m=")) {
            xlog("m-line: $avp(mline)\n");
            xlog("raw: $avp(mline)");
            xlog("Extracting Port from Media Line");
            dp_translate("400", "$avp(mline)/$avp(m_port_b_leg)");
            xlog("Translated m_port_b_leg is: $avp(m_port_b_leg)");
        }

Now we have an AVP called $avp(m_port_b_leg) which contains the RTP Port from the SDP.

Now we’ve got a few other values we might want to get, such as the IP the RTP is to go to, etc, we can extract this in the same way, with Dialplans and store them as AVPs:

        #Print current SDP Values and store as Vars
        if(sdp_get_line_startswith("$avp(mline)", "m=")) {
            xlog("m-line: $avp(mline)\n");
            xlog("raw: $avp(mline)");
            xlog("Extracting Port from Media Line");
            dp_translate("400", "$avp(mline)/$avp(m_port_b_leg)");
            xlog("Translated m_port_b_leg is: $avp(m_port_b_leg)");
        }

        if(sdp_get_line_startswith("$avp(oline)", "o=")) {
            xlog("o-line: $avp(oline)\n");
            dp_translate("401", "$avp(oline)/$avp(o_line_port_1)");
            xlog("O Line Port 1: $avp(o_line_port_1)");
            dp_translate("402", "$avp(oline)/$avp(o_line_port_2)");
            xlog("O Line Port 2: $avp(o_line_port_2)");
            dp_translate("403", "$avp(oline)/$avp(o_ip_b_leg)");
            xlog("O IP: $avp(o_ip_b_leg)");
        }

And all the Regex you’ll need:

INSERT INTO `dialplan` VALUES 
(4,400,10,1,'m=audio (\\d*)',0,'m=audio (\\d*)','\\1','SDP M Port Stripper'),
(5,401,10,1,'o=[^ ]* (\\d*) (\\d*) IN IP4 (\\d*.d*.\\d*.\\d*)',0,'o=[^ ]* (\\d*) (\\d*) IN IP4 (\\d*.d*.\\d*.\\d*)','\\1','O Port 1'),
(6,402,10,1,'o=[^ ]* (\\d*) (\\d*) IN IP4 (\\d*.d*.\\d*.\\d*)',0,'o=[^ ]* (\\d*) (\\d*) IN IP4 (\\d*.d*.\\d*.\\d*)','\\2','O Port 2'),
(7,403,10,1,'o=[^ ]* (\\d*) (\\d*) IN IP4 (\\d*.d*.\\d*.\\d*)',0,'o=[^ ]* (\\d*) (\\d*) IN IP4 (\\d*[.]\\d*[.]\\d*[.]\\d*)','\\3','O IP');