[Asterisk-Users] SIP Gerenal settings conufsion

[Johnathan Corgan]

Jeffrey Starin wrote:

> I have a little confusion about the general settings (other than the 
> register values) in the SIP
> General area. 

[snip]

> However, I'm confused as to the purpose of the
> "general" settings -- to what or which connection do they apply?  Since
> the context suggested for the general settings is something like
> "nothing" to avoid unwanted sip calls, I'm confused as to the purposse
> of values in the general section since all parameters for communications 
> with VOIP providers is contained in the contexts such as I specified 
> above, i.e., [FWD] or for example [BROADVOICE].  Can someone shed some 
> light on that for me?

Well, your confusion is understandable, given the way sip.conf works. 
    Parameters which affect incoming calls are not separated from those 
that affect outgoing calls, so it's easy to get mixed up (well, for me, 
anyway.)

In the [general] section the parameters become the defaults used unless 
overridden in a specific peer section.  Also, if an incoming or outgoing 
SIP call doesn't match a specific peer section, these parameters get used.

So, for example, if you don't want any incoming SIP calls that aren't 
from a known provider, you can set the default context to something 
innocuous as you describe above and the call will get rejected as a 
non-existent context.  This is what you described in our original mail.

But also in this [general] section are settings for *outbound* calls 
using SIP that aren't using a specific peer section.  This can be done 
with the Dial command, using a dial string such as IP/xxxxx at provider.com 
where provider.com is not listed in sip.conf.  This might happen, say, 
in the case of using the ENUM lookup capability, where the outbound SIP 
address of a phone number is determined dynamically at call time rather 
than pre-configured in extensions.conf/sip.conf.

Personally, I'd like to see this changed so there are two 'general' 
sections--one for default parameters to use unless overridden when there 
*is* a peer section below, and a different one to describe parameters to 
use when the remote peer is not previously known.  I know there are ways 
to accomplish this with the existing sip.conf structure but it seems 
very counter-intuitive.

-Johnathan