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The Almighty Buck

Building a Community VoIP Directory Server? 19

Posted by Cliff from the your-fingers-can-still-do-the-walking dept.
Christopher Rath asks: "Earlier this month, a reference to Clay Shirky's piece on ZapMail was posted as a Slashdot article. An obvious (to me) next step, which was hinted at in a couple of the postings which followed, was for the Internet community---you and me---to put up a VoIP directory server. I want to use an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA), like the Cisco ATA or The Kompany's new tkcPhone, to talk to other guys who have ATAs too; I have very little interest in making a local call using the ATA (for that I've still got my Bell land-line). Surely someone has already started such a project, if not, why not?"

"To make investing in an ATA worthwhile, I need an easy method of establishing a connection. In the current broadband environment, where most of us don't have static IP addresses, this means that we need our ATA to register itself with some VoIP directory server that can be used to assist with "dialing the number": as a user I want to remember my friend's ATA number, and then the directory server maps this to the ATA's current address. Once my ATA has the other ATA's address, the call should be ATA-to-ATA without any burden on the directory server."
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Building a Community VoIP Directory Server? More

Building a Community VoIP Directory Server?

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  • In the past, getting listed was always the problem. There were a thousand different softwares that used their own directories.

    Look at the simple IRC network. It's not really that simple, but in terms of who is using what, it's just a simple layout. Who's network you prefer is decided by features and content. IM suffers from this too.

    The same goes for the phone software. Who's directory would you want to be on?
    • have a lookup like DNS for people
      and have a redundant backbone, yes
      • And who owns it? Who funds it? I doubt the gov't will.. or is it the registries? There's no central authority, like ICANN.. (ICANT?)

        -s

        • Who funds it? Who owns it?

          How does any community-based server on the Internet get funded? First, some interested individual(s) puts up the server. Then, as usage picks up they get creative: ads, selling stuff, donations, subscription fees, etc. In this case I would envision a low cost (say $5 per year) listing fee. It's owned by whoever puts it up, or by some independent entity created for the purpose.

          Let's keep the government out of it.

          • Well, if it's not gov't held, we kinda get a mess, no?

            AIM, MSN, Y! and ICQ messengers
            Java and C#
            efnet and undernet

            We'll just have a split on who is using what again.
  • have a dynamic ip lookup that associates your [dynamic] ip with an address, email, or land line. And you can use 128+ bit keys to authenticate, or use SSL to further encrypt the built in key. Then you can look everyone up on the system, and have VoIP converstions.

    lates/matt

  • http://www.freeworldialup.com/ (Score:3, Informative)

    by Lionel Hutts ( 65507 ) on Monday January 20, 2003 @12:33AM (#5116776) Journal
    Does Pulver's Free World Dialup [freeworldialup.com] not do what you want?
  • I've been wishing for this same thing.
    I think a directory such as this could be a first step a lot of interesting tech

    With a broadband connection and an extention of this service your
    home computer ( and anything connected to it) could be only a cell phone away..

    "Hey I think i'll call home..see if the mail is in the box..and let's double check that coffee pot==off"

    of course this would also lead to the death (or reformating) of the baby bells..and something tells me they won't go without a BIG fight
    • i'm too tired to make my own point....

      I think the solution here would be a series of
      dns like databases that would be linked in to one
      this would prevent another IM type war and create an easy, sane way to communicate with friends and family

      ie: not haveing to keep track of one VoIP id, and IM id, a land line, cell phone, etc.

  • There isn't really any need to "a" community server for this, it should be as distributed ans DNS. It would be easiest for most if your ISP would host a SIP registrar server. Then your VoIP address can simply be "sip:myemail@mydomain". Without that, there are free SIP registrars one can already use, see http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/sip/servers.html for a few of them. Of course, the /. gang can always add an SVR record to their own DNS entries, point back to their selected sip registrar. Then once again you can use a sip uri of "sip:myemail@mydomain" while using a 3rd party registrar not hosted at mydomain.
    • Nobody thinks about P2P ? Completly distributed, with large-scale efficient search procedures, possibility of certifications: a large white pages.
  • i have looked at this serveral times before and even had several slashdot posts rejected on the subject matter. I wanted to do exactly what your talking about. i also however wanted to setup a system with pstn gateways so if you had a gateway on your phone and the server could dial an 800 # with it ( to verify that you were indeed sharing ) you could then use other folks pstn lines wherever. for indeed free long distance. no charging, all free. however for both a standalone ip phone and/or the internet line jack price wise the cost is just to great to convince people to switch.

    i think if there was an incredibly cheap way to do it people would jump all over it
  • It'd be nice to have a directory, but what would be nicer is some software for Linux so I can use a microphone and broadband.
    The only software I could find was for managing VOIP for exchanges.

    • I think Speak Freely [fourmilab.ch] may be what you are looking for. I haven't tried it, but I did look into it. It seemed like a lot of trouble to get working, but if you're already using ALSA sound drivers, you're probably halfway there. I don't think the OSS drivers are able to do full duplex (playing and recording at the same time), so you probably won't be able to use the program very well with OSS drivers.

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