UCSecurity

I had loads of fun last night with the FreeSWITCH package on pfSense.  All the fun was directly related to my VOIP provider BroadVoice and what was likely a bad initial config.  It ended up taking me somewhere on the order of six hours messing with it, taking tcpdumps and analyzing them (thank you Wireshark!) to decide to try another provider (duh, why didn’t I do this an hour in?).

Thanks to flowroute.com (if I was willing to change my phone number you would likely be my new provider), I was able to confirm that the issue had nothing to do with the pfSense package.  I had my SIP connection up to flowroute.com in ohhh about 30 seconds, no exaggeration, and placing outbound calls.  Thus eliminating the FreeSWITCH config (I didn’t have any real doubts, but after hours, well, ya know ), I decided to try Zoiper.  It connected right up to one of BroadVoices proxies that I hadn’t tried with FreeSWITCH.  Figuring I’d probably tripped up BroadVoices security (their SBCs are quite sensitive), I attempted again with FreeSWITCH to the same proxy I used with Zoiper.  Again with the failures and now Zoiper would fail also *sigh*.  At this point I was all but ready to just give up on VOIP altogether resolving to give it one last QUICK try in the morning.

Thanks to some moral support from a friend I tried one last trick before passing out.  Luckily I actually have a /29, but all these tests had been using the same source address.  So, off to the external firewall to change the NAT address for my PBX.  And we get a successful connection the first time.  So, here’s the lesson – BroadVoices documentation for people changing their ATAs has them rebooting their cable modem, I figured it was for the MAC address crap…turns out, they probably just wanted you to change your source address.  UGGGH.  I killed FreeSWITCH last night after getting a successful registration and placing a call, I’m hoping enough time has elapsed to revert my NAT changes and go back to using my desired egress IP.  The FreeSWITCH package rocks BTW, thank you mcrane!

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Tags: broadvoice, freeswitch, pfsense, voip