[OpenSIPS-Users] Is OpenSIPS the right tool for the job? And if so, what version?

[Thomas Løcke]

Hey all,

Let me start by saying that I'm a complete beginner in the arts of
SIP, but I'm eager to learn, and usually not too thick to understand
fairly complicated things.  :o)

I've become involved in a project that at some point is going to need
a few FreeSWITCH servers, so naturally we've started learning how to
configure, maintain and use FreeSWITCH. Then the other day I had a
meeting with a potential business partner (a telco using Asterisk and
OpenSIPS), and he told me about the wonders of OpenSIPS, and urged me
to add OpenSIPS to our stack, since it would, and I quote: "greatly
simplify our setup, while giving us more control".

His main point was that instead of having many FreeSWITCH servers
facing the world, I could instead settle on a few OpenSIPS servers
forwarding calls to the relevant FreeSWITCH server(s), depending on
the number called.

This sorta/kinda made sense to me, as I'm already doing something
similar with HTTP proxies: Many webservers hidden behind a few HTTP
proxies.

Where things start to fall apart for me, is figuring out if OpenSIPS
is the tool for this job. When looking at the website and the
documentation, OpenSIPS appears to me to do a whole lot more than
"just proxying", and coming at it as a beginner seems like a very
daunting task. By the way, I have ordered a bunch of SIP related books
from Amazon (and even an OpenSIPS book!), so I should have plenty of
reading material readily available soon.

What I need OpenSIPS to do is route calls to specific PSTN numbers to
specific FreeSWITCH servers.

Lets say I have 1000 PSTN numbers and 10 FreeSWITCH servers. When my
telco receives a call on numbers 1-100 I want OpenSIPS to route the
call to FreeSWITCH server 1. Calls to PSTN number 101-200 goes to
FreeSWITCH server 2 and so on and so forth. At some point we might
also want to add some fail over and load balancing logic to the setup.

Is this something that can be done using OpenSIPS? Is it the right
tool for the job? Or should I perhaps redefine the job completely?

My next question is: What OpenSIPS version?