[AG-TECH] VXGas available for Testing

[Rhys Hawkins]

Hi,

VXGas is now available for testing. VXGas is a Gateway between AccessGrid and SIP.
It has quite limited support for SIP clients at present, namely Ekiga (www.ekiga.org),
but more support will be added as quirks of different clients are worked out.

Entry point for vxgas is at the following web page:
  http://vxgas.sift.anu.edu.au:5080/vxgas

Basically, find a venue you want to go to by expanding the treeview on the left, and click on the 
link. If ekiga is properly installed it will fire up automatically and join the venue via VXGas.
If not, then the sip url is shown in the status bar (at least on FireFox) and you can manually 
type it into your SIP client. Some sip example sip urls are (see the web page for all that are
available):

  sip:asiapacificaccessgridlobby at sift.anu.edu.au
  sip:testroom at sift.anu.edu.au

Some SIP clients don't do DNS SRV requests (part of the SIP standard) so if this is the case, you 
will have to modify the above urls to be:

  sip:asiapacificaccessgridlobby at vxgas.sift.anu.edu.au:5060
  sip:testroom at vxgas.sift.anu.edu.au:5060

You will show up in the Venue as "<name> (VXGas)" where <name> is whatever you configured
your SIP client with. There is currently a delay of about 5 - 10 seconds before audio/video 
comes through to the SIP client from the time of connection.

This instance of vxgas is configured as a duplication of the Asia Pacific Venue Server
at https://vv3.vislab.uq.edu.au:8000/Venues/default. All of the venues are watch-only, ie
audio and video from the sip client will not be sent into the venue. The rationale for this is 
that some audio from some sip clients causes RAT to crash. The exception is the "Test Room" in 
which two way communication is available. 

This is the 0.1.0 beta release so expect "issues", and servers might go down etc. If you
want to get an idea of what this looks like, but can't seem to make it work or the server 
appears to have gone down, there are some mpegs on the following page:

  http://sheriff.anu.edu.au/~rhys/index.html

Look under Presentations: AccessGrid Retreat 2006. The "SIP Client(Ekiga) to AccessGrid Venue" 
and "Phone call to AccessGrid Venue" movies.

Source code for VXGas is available here:
  http://sheriff.anu.edu.au/~rhys/VXGas/index.html

Please send mail regarding VXGas to:
  vx at if.anu.edu.au

Cheers,
    Rhys