[Ekiga-list] Resolved: Thompson ST585 v6 router stability problems

[Alec Leamas <leamas alec gmail com>]

I have the the subject router, a decision from my ISP I have to live 
with. I've really never been able achieve long-term stability with 
Ekiga, the registration has dropped after some time (~1 hour?). Another 
strange symptom has been the Edit Acoount Dialog. When invoked and saved 
with the same data, my registrar became "Unregistered". Repeating the 
Edit/Save procedure, still w same data, turned the registrar to 
"Registered".

To make it work at all I after a while found out that the router has an 
Application Layer Gateway (ALG) for sip (thanks, Damien!). Using this 
means to disable stun, and rely on the the routers' sip management. And 
indeed, I could both call place and recieve calls. But no long-term 
stability.

The problem seems to be the ALG, it's just buggy according to a lot of 
threads out there. Furhermore, it cannot be disabled with the v6 version 
of the firmware. It was possible in some older versions(!)

Solution: go around the ALG by using another port than 5060 (I use 
5080). Enable stun. Setup port forwarding (a k a Game Sharing...) to 
port 5080/UDP in the router. Done.

BTW: this means that it's not a trivial setup decision to use the ALG 
just because it's there. This à propos the discussion about automatic 
recognition of sip-aware routers in the initial configuration wizard.

Cheers

--alec