| Initial release | June 1999 |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 2.3.5 / July 26th, 2011 |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Communication software |
| License | GNU GPL |
| Website | http://www.gnugk.org/ |
The GNU Gatekeeper (abbreviated as GnuGk) is an open-sourced project that implements an H.323 gatekeeper based on the OpenH323 or H323Plus stack. A gatekeeper provides address translation, admissions control, call routing, authorization and accounting services to an H.323 system defined on the H.323 standard by ITU-T.
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GnuGk contains a rich set of features, including
It is covered by the GNU General Public License. Besides, the authors explicitly grant the right to link it to the OpenH323 and OpenSSL libraries. This is necessary, since GNU GPL is incompatible with the licenses of these libraries.
Originally, a proof-of-concept gatekeeper was developed by Xianping Chen, Joe Metzger and Rajat Todi for an experiment. In the beginning of 1999, Jan Willamowius convinced the first authors to license their code under GNU GPL and started the project. [1]
The code was named OpenH323 Gatekeeper, short OpenH323GK. A team at mediaWays provided LDAP subsystem and overlapped sending. In 2000, there are tens of people contributed to the project for coding and testing.
In the beginning of 2001, Chih-Wei Huang at Citron and his team began to use and modify the project for their VoIP services. In September 2001 Openh323GK version 1.0 was released.
In 2002, GnuGk 2.0 was released. It had new architecture for gatekeeper routed mode which is capable of handling thousands of concurrent calls. Besides, full H.323 proxy and Citron's NAT technology were introduced. These features made it become a carrier-graded H.323 gatekeeper suitable for commercial operations.
To avoid confusion with other OpenH323 based gatekeepers, the project was renamed to GNU Gatekeeper, short GnuGk, to reflect the fact that is was the only gatekeeper available under a GNU license.
Version 2.2 was released in 2004 with a redesigned architecture, followed by the more stable version 2.2.1 in 2005.[2]
With version 2.2.4 in 2006 call failover, ENUM and CLI rewriting were introduced.[3]
The official website maintains an interoperability list for H.323 software and products.
Jan Willamowius is the project founder and current maintainer.
Over the years dozens of people contributed code and bug fixes. Among the most active were the team a Mediaways (LDAP), Michal Zygmuntowicz (radius support), Chih-Wei Huang (2.2 redesign), and Simon Horn (NAT features).