LanScape

Version History File For LanScape Centrex Proxy Server™

Version 3.42

“Allow your customers to do what they do best, communicate.” ™

Purpose:

This file will briefly outline the product changes, enhancements and bug fixes that have been performed on the LanScape Centrex Proxy Server™.



Version History:

V3.42:

New Features and Capabilities

Product distribution now includes the LanScape Service Manager Suite.

The Centrex proxy server now comes bundled with the LanScape Service Manager Suite. With the LanScape Service Manager Suite, you can now run the SIP proxy server as a windows service. The Service Manager Suite can also be used to run any other user supplied GUI or console application, batch file or script as a Windows service.

Centrex Proxy Server can now execute as a service using the Service Manager Suite.

The Centrex Proxy Server can be executed on the server host machine as an NT service or a Windows service. The primary advantage of running the proxy server as a service is that the Centrex Proxy Server® will be started when the host machine is started. It does not matter if a user logs into the server machine or not. The Centrex Proxy Server® will also automatically shutdown gracefully when the server host machine shuts down.

Benefits of running as a service:


Automatically start and stop the proxy server when the host machine starts/stops.

Monitor the proxy server for fault situation.

Automatically restart the proxy server if faults occur.

Periodically restart the proxy server software if need be to help preserver long term overall server stability.

Create log file data that reflects the fault monitoring activity of the proxy server.

Running VOIP server software as a service is generally required in secure network environments.

Add new configuration setting to ignore SIP "Content-Length:" header errors.

A new configuration setting has been added to the proxy that will allow the proxy to ignore SIP "Content-Length:" header errors.

Some customers have reported certain problems associated with SIP devices or user agents that do not set the content length header properly. This new proxy setting can be used to allow these erroneous SIP devices and user agents to still be used in your deployment.

Note: Using this setting indicates a problem with your SIP device or user agent. You should contact the manufacturer or distributor of your SIP device or user agent and request that they fix their "Content-Length" SIP header errors.

Added remote event logging capabilities.

Remote event logging capabilities have been added to this latest release of the Centrex Proxy Server. Remote event logging allows other third party server monitoring tools to be used with the Centrex Proxy Server. This capability is primarily use when deploying multiple Centrex Proxy Servers that are running as a service on the server host machine.

However, remote event log monitoring can also be used for single server deployments if required.

Added proxy configuration backup and restore support.

The Centrex Proxy Server now supports proxy configuration backup and restore support. This capability is useful when administering multiple proxy servers or when debugging multiple proxy configurations.

Enable or disable system tray balloon tips.

Added support for enabling or disabling system tray balloon tips. When disabled, the proxy will not display system tray "informational balloons" during proxy operation.

Proxy now reports an error if SIP UDP port is in use.

The Centrex Proxy Server now reports an appropriate error if the SIP UDP port is in use by another application. If another application is using the configured SIP port, an error will be logged to the event log area of the GUI.

Added new logic to repair corrupt Via headers from other SIP devices.

As the result of interoperational testing with other SIP devices and soft phones, the Centrex Proxy Server has been updated to fix corrupt Via headers.

This new SIP protocol handling logic that will allow the proxy to correct corrupt Via headers that are returned as the result of SIP INVITE transactions.

Users who deploy SJ Labs SJPhone soft phone will immediately be able to take advantage of this capability seeing that SJPhone does not properly preserver Via headers as of SJPhone v1.60.289a.

User configurable default registration time.

The Centrex proxy can now be configured via the GUI to use a default registration interval time (in milliseconds). This new configuration parameter allows a default registration time to be assigned to SIP user agents that register and do not specify a registration "expire" time for contacts.

Note: If you are deploying SJ Labs SJ Phone softphone, your SJPhones will now register properly.

Added digital IDs to ODBC database driver DLLs.

This version of the proxy server incorporates digital IDs for the registrar and authentication ODBC driver DLLs.

Using this capability will remove the possibility that a user selects a wrong DLL driver that may cause configuration or operational errors.

Bug fixes

Main application window position problem.

Under certain conditions, the main application window of the proxy may not be visible or is displayed off screen when the proxy server starts up. When this occurs, the main application window cannot be viewed. This problem has been fixed.

Main proxy event log file not saved to default directory.

Under certain situations, the log file used for proxy event logging may not be saved to the desired working directory of the proxy. This problem has been fixed.

Main application windows not being displayed.

Under certain situations the main Centrex Proxy application window may not be displayed if the operating system was shut down and the proxy server was still running.

When this condition occurred, the only way to get the main window to display properly would be to delete registry entries associated with the last main window position.

This problem is related to the proxy server’s ability to keep track of the last main window position. In some shut down scenarios, the proxy would get all negative screen coordinates for the main window. Then next time the proxy is started, the main window would be moved “off screen” thus making it look as if the main window is never displayed even though an icon can be seen in the system tray and the proxy server is present in the task bar.

This problem has been fixed.

Modified the installer so that when upgrading, multiple entries are not shown in Add/Remove Programs.

The product installation image has been updated so that when upgrading to future version, you can install over the top of your existing installation and not have multiple entries being shown in Add/Remove Programs of control panel.

If you are upgrading from an earlier version of this software to this latest version, you can still install this version over your existing installed image. However, you will see two product entries in Add/Remove Programs. If you do not want to see multiple entries for this product in Add/Remove Programs, uninstall your current version and install this latest version.

Note: Be sure to make a backup of the current install directory to ensure that critical license or other files do not mistakenly get deleted.

Unregister problem when Contact header consists of a single asterisk.

Fixed a parsing bug that was associated with registration functionality. The bug would cause the Centrex proxy server to send a "400 Bad Request" for Un-Register requests that would use a single asterisk in the Contact header such as:

"Contact: *"

This issue has now been resolved and un-registering using a single asterisk in the Contact header now functions normally.

V3.41:

New Features and Capabilities

Greater interoperability capability.

This version of the LanScape Centrex Proxy™ Server has been put through another extensive round of interoperability testing to ensure the highest degree of operations with SIP devices and software from other manufacturers. The following SIP devices and soft phones have been added to the Centrex Proxy™ Server SIP interoperability list:


SIP desktop phones:

Avaya 4600 series IP telephones (Release 2.2):
4601 IP Telephone
4602 IP Telephone
4610SW IP Telephone
4620 IP Telephone
4621SW IP Telephone
4622SW IP Telephone
4625 IP Telephone
4630SW IP Screenphone
Avaya 4690 IP Speakerphone

SwissVoice:
IP10S SIP phone

Linksys-Sipura:
SPA841 SIP Business phone
SPA941 SIP Business phone

Grandstream Networks
Budgetone 101 SIP phone
Budgetone 102 SIP phone
GXP-2000 Enterprise IP Telephone

Polycom SoundPoint® IP Family of Desktop Phones:
SoundPoint® IP 300
SoundPoint® IP 301
SoundPoint® IP 500
SoundPoint® IP 501
SoundPoint® IP 600
SoundPoint® IP 601

Snom VOIP Phones:
Snom 300 IP phone
Snom 320 IP phone
Snom 360 IP phone


SIP Soft phones:
Xten-Counterpath EyeBeam v1.1 voice and video soft phone
Polycom PVX 8.0.1 voice and video soft phone
Snom 360 v5.3
sipXphone (Pingtel) v2.6.0.27
eStara SoftPHONE v3.0.0.18

Centrex Proxy now supports a powerful shared-domain registrar database.

This new powerful feature will allow you to deploy multiple Centrex Proxy Servers that manage different VOIP domains but share the same registration database.

The main objective of this new feature is to greatly simplify multi proxy deployments and inter domain calling. All users in the shared domains can call each other directly as if all users were located in the same domain. This capability also offers you another deployment model that is easy and highly scalable. This capability allows you to manually manage proxy load sharing without additional 3rd party solutions. All this capability with full media proxying for NAT traversal is supported.

For example: With this capability, you can deploy multiple Centrex Proxies. All of the proxies can be configured to access a remote registrar database (MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, etc) either co-located with the proxies or remotely located. You can assign as many users to each proxy as appropriate thus managing your worst case call load per proxy.

Centrex Proxy now tests VOIP Media Proxy versions.

The Centrex Proxy server will now test the version of communicating VOIP Media Proxy servers. If the version of the VOIP Media Proxy used is not adequate, then a warning will be logged by the Centrex Proxy server.

Allowed the Centrex Proxy to monitor its IP address as dynamic.

The Centrex Proxy Server can now be configured to specify the primary IP address of the proxy as being dynamic. If the IP address of the server is dynamic, then the proxy server will monitor the network adaptor for possible changes in the dynamic IP address.

This feature is especially useful for SOHO (small office - home office) deployments where a static IP address for the proxy server is not available or possible.

Note: LanScape still recommends that you deploy our session and media proxies using static IP addresses. However, this capability allows the deployment where static IP addresses are not available.

Improved WAN IP address monitoring.

Improved the ability to use DNS and the SIP proxy domain name to monitor and resolve the WAN IP address of the proxy. The proxy can now be configured to use DNS, the domain name and a monitor interval to detect WAN IP address changes.

ODBC database interface for authentication information.

The Centrex Proxy™ Server now fully supports an ODBC database interface to allow all authentication information to be retrieved from a remote database.

Using this functionality, greatly simplifies the ability to provision user accounts from a centrally located authentication database. This new version of the product comes with an example Microsoft Access and MySQL authentication database. The proxy will be able to retrieve authentication information from any data source that is supported by proper ODBC drivers.

Fully supports "MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver" version 3.51.12.0.

ODBC database driver error messages now logged to the event log.

All ODBC database driver error messages are now logged to the event log GUI display area. This will allow you to quickly diagnose problems associated with connecting to a remote registrar database.

Also, ODBC driver errors descriptions (and error codes) are displayed to the user in a modal dialog when the user chooses to configure and test a remote registrar database connection.

Added support for new SIP keep alive messages.

Added support for new SIP keep alive message that contains a single ASCII '0' character. If a SIP message is received by the proxy that only contains a single '0' character, the received data will be ignored.

Note: Other normal SIP keep alive messages are still supported (i.e. SIP messages containing only white space characters or SIP messages containing all NULL characters).

Bug fixes

Possible memory leaks in external registrar database driver DLL.

Fixed esoteric small memory leaks in external registrar database driver DLL The memory leaks that were fixed would not be seen under normal operation. They only occurred during certain configuration parameter corruption tests.

Fixed multi line ODBC connection string data entry.

Changes have been implemented to allow the user to type in directly multi line ODBC connection string into the registrar database configuration dialog. The offending edit control in pervious versions did not accept the return key so the only method available to specify a multi line ODBC connect string was to paste the multi line string into the configuration dialog. This issue has been resolved.

Multi-line ODBC connection strings for registrar DB not saved properly.

The extended DLL driver used for ODBC access of an external registrar database may under certain situation only save the first line of a multi lined ODBC connect string when specified in the configuration dialog.

This has the effect of causing later boots cycles of the proxy to generate a registrar database error when the proxy attempts to reconnect to the remote registrar database. This issue has been fixed.

Proxy not handling 480 Temporarily Unavailable properly.

Under certain situations, the Centrex Proxy did not properly propagate the "480 Temporarily unavailable" SIP message to the initiator of a call. This problem has been fixed.

Call hold and unhold problem after cal has been routed to a new location – eyeBeam.

This problem is associated with eyebeam soft phones only.

Under certain eyeBeam configurations, call hold and unhold (as initiated from the eyeBeam) may not route properly as the result of the Centrex Proxy routing the call to a secondary call routing endpoint. It appears that conflicting SIP header information gets placed in Re-INVITE SIP messages from Counterpath eyeBeam soft phones..

A patch has been implemented that will allow call hold/unhold to route properly through the proxy when the call is routed to secondary locations and initiated from the eyeBeam.

Improper call routing regular expression syntax crashes server.

Under some conditions, entering improper call routing regular expressions could cause the server to generate an access violation and crash the server. To fix this bug, call routing regular expression error handling has been improved and made more robust.

Possible memory leak when using VOIP Media Proxy.

Fixed a possible memory leak situation that could occur if more than one media session is requested by the Centrex Proxy and allocated by the VOIP Media Proxy server.

V3.40:

Initial version 3.x product offering. Replaces all legacy versions of LanScape SIP proxies.

December 2006,

LanScape Corporation