[Ekiga-list] STUN troubles?

[Patrick van Staveren]

Howdy folks,

I've never used Ekiga before, but have been travelling for GUADEC and
wanted to get pc-to-phone set up while I'm overseas.  So I got it set up
with diamond card, and figured I was all good to go.  Then I started to
fight with the (seemingly common beast) that is connecting over SIP.

I first was using the Ekiga STUN server, and it took quite a while to
connect to the echo test number -- about 60 seconds.  I didn't make much
of this; I just figured it was slow.  Then I tried making actual phone
calls with diamond card, but by the time the phone rang and I picked it
up, it had already disconnected on the phone end and Ekiga hadn't even
shown a connection yet.  After a few more seconds, it would finally
connect, but the actual land line would have disconnected.

So then I did a quick port forward (on a foreign router) to allow UDP
5000-5100 thru.  And now it works like a charm!  Connections rarely take
more than a second to connect, and I actually hear the introduction at
the start of the Ekiga echo test.

Essentially, it seems that with STUN, the connection actually happens
almost immediately, but Ekiga doesn't actually recognize the connection
for another 50-60 seconds.

Are there any good reasons why STUN would work, but react horribly slow
like this?  It's a decently fast internet connection (8mbit/384kbit).
My laptop is slow (pentium 3) but it doesn't appear to be suffering from
any extensive load.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Patrick van Staveren