[Ekiga-list] Newbie configuration experiences...

[Alec Leamas <leamas alec gmail com>]

First of all: I actually got Ekiga 3.0.1 running to the point of a 
working call to the echo service on my Fedora 10 box which is a Good 
Thing. You are doing a great job!

However, being a newbie I found it a little harder than it ought to be. 
If it's an objective that Ekiga should be easy to setup, here are some 
remarks:

Sound device selection.

- There is no support for testing the output devices
  ("Play test sound") for output nor ringing device in
  the device selection menu. I think it should.

- On my Fedora box, some selections makes Ekiga really weird
  e. g., it's possible to connect but not to disconnect.
  The bad thing is that there is no user feedback indicating
  that this is a problem with the sound devices, which makes
  it hard to figure out what's going on.

NAT traversal and router setup:

- My router is a NAT router with the dreaded "Symmetric NAT".
  There *is* an error message when Ekiga is started which
  basically says that I have to configure the router manually.
  The crucial term "Symmetric NAT" is *not* mentioned in this
  message. I finally learned to start ekiga with debug output,
  and grep for 'stun' to reveal this fact. This should really
  easier, the information about "Symmetric NAT" should be
  displayed to the user.

- Once I understood that  my router was doing Symmetric NAT I
  configured port forwarding according to the docs (dynamic,
  triggered ports is not properly handled by my Thomson
  router). I came to a point with working connect/disconnect
  but no sound.

- After some more reading, I understood that the stunnel
  stuff was in the way. So I needed to disable stunnel. There
  are no switches in the UI for this, and even in gconf
  there is no "Use stunnel" option. What I did was to set
  the stunnel host to a non-existing value. This created a
  lot of error messages, and a working Ekiga... This should
  be easier and more straightforward IMHO.

The issue to setup Ekiga with a router doing symmetric NAT couldn't 
really be out of the box, I understand that. But I still think this 
process could be easier with better error messages and configuration 
options. Or, maybe, a "Symmetric NAT" wizard?

Last but not least, I shouldn't have taken the time to write this unless 
I really appreciate what you are doing...

--Alec