Re: [Ekiga-list] Trouble getting cross-plattform video to work

[yannick <sevmek free fr>]

Le mercredi 24 décembre 2008 à 13:49 +0100, Torsten Crass a écrit :
> The first issue seemed 
> to have been related to NAT stuff (again) -- my relatives' router (a 
> German T-Online Speedport W700V) "successfully" blocked my attempts
> to 
> even register with ekiga.net; registration was possible only after 
> completely disabling the built-in firewall. I wonder which wicked
> things 
> this router was trying to do -- instead of just translating my 
> datagrams' addresses to and fro. (Anybody else out there having
> trouble 
> with Speeport routers...? Models W770V and W500 (without "V") in
> particular)
> 
> But even after disabling the firewall and successful registration
> (here 
> comes the 2nd problem) neither audio nor video was transmitted when 
> trying out ekiga.net's echo service. :-(
> 

After some googling, it seems quite clear to me this router ( Speedport 
W770V ) tries to help ekiga, and doing so it confuse it.
Almost all the interesting pages are in german, I wont be able to help
further configuring this router, but here is one good exemple of this
router dealing with the SIP protocol:
http://www.sipload.de/hilfe/inst_speed.php

As Ekiga and the router try to both deal with SIP at the same time but
are not able to coordinate the effort, the result is a failure.

This issue, the lack of communication about the network topology between
the end-point (the ekiga softphone) and the router is a general issue
for the internet. There is people working on to solve it in the internet
standardisation field. ICE looks very promising:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-mmusic-ice-19

Still there is no such standard at the moment.

As a result, some router designer feels free to add or not support for
SIP and they mostly do it there own way.

It can be good reasons to implement SIP support in the router, as it
seems the best spot in the LAN to deal with the internet, IPs, ports
etc. Maybe it will add some benefits with this router (e.g. prioritising
VoIP over other connections like games).

Thus you have to manually configure either Ekiga, either the router,
maybe both.

In Ekiga you can disable the STUN support, as descibed in this feature
request (there is no option to do so in ekiga 3.0.x):
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=562347
But as it is the windows version, you'll find this configuration in a
file probably located here:
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR LOGIN\Applications Data\ekiga.conf
The key should be something like:
general/nat/method, and you probably needs to turn it to 0 to disable
STUN support (i'm not really sure, as i get this information from the
linux version...)
Maybe this operation will be enough to get ekiga working on windows with
this router, maybe you'll need to configure the router too. I cannot
help for this step :(

> Dammit, I'd really love to see an idiot-proof open-protocoll-based 
> open-source alternative to the "Microsoft of internet telephony", as
> one 
> might call Skype...
> 

Skype face exactly the same situation (except for the skype support in
routers which seems very unlikely as the protocol is closed) and it
deals with it using as many tricks it can, relaying on a peer-to-peer
internet subnetwork. This way of doing things is a MAJOR trouble for
security concerns and is against a healthy internet. Still it works in
most cases...

> So if anyone had some idea on how to deal with the above mentioned 
> issues, I'd be glad... Or maybe some debug info (yes, meanwhile I 
> learned how to make Ekiga talk... :-) would be helpful?

I hope this will help.

Best regards,
Yannick