[asterisk-users] tired of "midget packet received" warnings

[Louis-David Mitterrand]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 09:29:20AM +0000, Tim Panton wrote:
> >>
> >> Your monitoring app is not sending valid IAX2 packets to the
> >> server. If
> >> it was sending a true IAX2 POKE, it would be a valid packet and
> >> wouldn't
> >> generate this warning.
> >
> > Could asterisk at least _not_ report this harmless, below-warning
> > event
> > when using a zero-verbose (asterisk -r) level? That would be nice and
> > logical.
>
> I'd take this warning seriously. It means that your monitoring app isn't
> monitoring what you think it is.

Granted, the monitoring app is simple minded: it only checks if a port
is open. In that respect is does a hell of a good job: I hear a beeping
alarm as soon as an asterisk instance goes south.

So what you are saying is that all monitoring apps should speak native
iax, else they are bad? Simply checking if a port is open means it's
"misconfigured" or badly written? I wouldn't go so far. Small generic
port-monitoring apps should be allowed to check on asterisk without
raising such spurious warnings. You know what happens when crying wolf
to often, no one listens after a while. A "midget packet" is not
corrupted, I do have a stateful firewall (fiaif) to intercept those.

<rant>
AFAIK the onus is on asterisk to adapat: I've suffered too long of the
infamous iax2 port-clogging bug that would and render a server
'unreachable' for no good reason. So much so that I went off iax2
entirely and use SIP exclusively for inter-asterisk communication. So
much for the muched touted "new and advanced" pbx communication protocol
the iax2 was sold for! This deal-breaker bug went unfixed for years
until recently, despite numerous asterisk users reporting iax2 anomalies
month after month. A I bitter? yes. Do I trust Digium folks to know
their stuff about what is "correct" or not in networking protocols? I'll
let you guess the answer.
</rant>

> I always want to know when I get malformed protocol packets in. It is
> always bad news, mostly either a misconfiguration (your case), an
> attack,
> (ie my firewall is not protecting this service) or a sign of a switch
> port going bad.
>
> Fix the cause not the symptom.
>
> T.
>
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