OpenH323 Gatekeeper - The GNU Gatekeeper is an open-source project that implements an H.323 gatekeeper. A gatekeeper provides call control services to the H.323 endpoints. It is an integral part of most useful internet telephony installations that are based on the H.323 standard.
According to Recommendation H.323, a gatekeeper shall provide the following services:
The GNU Gatekeeper implements most of these functions based on the OpenH323 protocol stack.
Recommendation H.323 is an international standard published by the ITU. It is a communications standard for audio, video, and data over the Internet. See also Paul Jones' A Primer on the H.323 Series Standard.
For a detailed description of what a gatekeeper does, see here.
It is covered by the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). In addition to that, we explicitly grant the right to link this code to the OpenH323 and OpenSSL library.
Generally speaking, the GNU GPL allows you to copy, distribute, resell or modify the software, but it requires that all derived works must be published under GNU GPL also. That means that you must publish full source for all extensions to the gatekeeper and for all programs you include the gatekeeper into. See the file COPYING for details.
If that's not what you want, you must interface to the gatekeeper through the status port and communicate via TCP with it. That way you only have to integrate the basic functionality into the gatekeeper (and provide source for that) and can keep other parts of your application private.
The formal name of this project is OpenH323 Gatekeeper - The GNU Gatekeeper, short GnuGk. Please don't confuse it with other gatekeeper projects.
There are several open-source gatekeeper projects based on the OpenH323 protocol stack.
A gatekeeper available under MPL. The project has been inactive for a period of time now.
Only in a very primary grades.
This one, also called GnuGk.
To have different gatekeepers with very similar names is really
confusing for most users.
Since our "OpenH323 Gatekeeper" was the first on the scene,
it is not our fault that others have chosen similar names.
But to make the distinction a little more clear without confusing
people even more, we have decided to give the project a
subtitle "OpenH323 Gatekeeper - The GNU Gatekeeper" and start
using gnugk as name for executables.
The newest stable and a development version are available at the download page.
The very latest source code is in the CVS at Sourceforge Web-GUI. Beware - that's the bleeding edge.
You can also download some executables from the download page.
There are two mailing list for the project, one for the developers and one for the users.
General user questions should be send to the users mailing list. You can find the list archive here. To join this mailing list, click here.
To report problems or submit bugs/patches, send mails to the developers mailing list. The list archive is here. Please send user questions to the users mailing list and keep this list to development! If you want to contribute to the project, please join the mailing list.
Note: Please don't send your questions as private emails to individual developer. We are usually busy. We would not like to be your private consultant, unless you'd like to pay us. Send your problems to the appropriate public mailing list so everybody can help you.
Also please don't send the GnuGk specific problems to the OpenH323 mailing list, or vice verse. They are different projects, though closely related.
Before you sending an email, make sure you have read the related documents carefully. Describe your problems clearly and precisely. Show us the error messages or logs if there is any.
The current project coordinator is
Jan Willamowius
<jan@willamowius.de>
The main features and functions of version 2.0 are contributed by
Chih-Wei Huang
<cwhuang@linux.org.tw>
and
Citron Network Inc.,
including thread-safe registration and call tables,
new routed mode architecture, H.323 proxy,
H.235 authentication and MySQL backend.
Michal Zygmuntowicz
<m.zygmuntowicz@onet.pl> has done some great work on Radius support and other improvements.
The initial version of the gatekeeper has been developed by Xiang Ping Chen, Joe Metzger and Rajat Todi.