Murmur, DBus and Perl

Short post this week, but a neat project came up that I want to throw together this weekend.

Some quick background. Murmur is a VoIP server. Its typical application is use with the Mumble client to provide voice communications for computer games in the same vein as Ventrillo or Teamspeak. Together it provides a great set of features that include encryption, distinct channels, ACLs similar to IRC, and even user accounts. It is also useful for conference voice communication that provides superior voice quality than that of Skype or even conventional telephone conference calls that tend to be half-duplex.

So what does that have to do with DBus or Perl?

Well, Murmur's configuration all happens via DBus. DBus comes with a CLI app to sending arbitrary data along the bus properly addressed to a listening daemon. And just to add a user to Murmur the length of the command is unwieldy. In fact, you have to send two commands to set the password. You can do all sorts of configuration via DBus, but it is pretty hairy having to do it by hand.

So enter Perl. CPAN has a module called Net::DBus. So I am going to write a set of tools to administer Murmur and publish to CPAN under the App:: namespace.

Lots of good modules to use to make that happen including Moose, MooseX::Getopt, App::Cmd, etc.

By Sunday evening, I should hopefully have something that works (with stand alone libs that could be consumed via GUI app) and we can work on refinements from there.

You'll see the repo show up github soonish.