Deploying SIP Witch Clients and Server How To

This document was created to help those using the GNU SIP Witch and Twinkle packages that have been created for use with Ubuntu. This howto is not necessarily Ubuntu-specific but is written from the perspective of a typical Ubuntu sysadmin.

Setting up APT

The GNU Telephony team has a number of packages built for various distributions of Ubuntu (Hardy through Jaunty) on Launchpad which may be directly installed from the team ppa. The ppa also gets updated automatically with new upstream releases. The ppa for the ubuntu package builds can be found at https://launchpad.net/~gnutelephony/+archive/ppa. Instructions for setting up ppa access can be found at https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPA.

Server Install

Assuming an apt source is setup, you should use:

apt-get install sipwitch sipwitch-plugin-forward

Or the equivalent from synaptic...

This will also automatically install libucommon2, libosip2-2, and libexosip2-4 or similar.

Server Configuration

First, there is /etc/default/sipwitch:

This should initially have PLUGINS="none" for now. We will later add PLUGINS="forward" here when we setup for use as a secure calling domain controller for Asterisk or FreeSwitch.

Then you should add a sipwitch "group" in /etc/group:

sudo usermod -aG sipwitch your-user-id

This matches the GROUP="sipwitch" line found in /etc/default/sipwitch. Perhaps the deb postinst should add the group for us in the future.