[asterisk-users] Why Nat=yes Nat=no Option?

[Alex Balashov]

Steve Totaro wrote:

> I have done some large installs where people are going to be in the 
> office, sometimes out, work from home, it always changes sorta thing......
> 
> I have found that setting all device profiles to Nat=yes "Just Works" 
> whether they are on the LAN or not and this is even on larger scale 
> systems with hundreds of "phones".
> 
> Is there any reason why this would be frowned upon as a default?  Even 
> to the point of, if nat= is not specified, it would default to yes?
> 
> Is there a performance hit somewhere, or some other downside?
> 
> If not, I suggest making it the default.

The premise of nat=yes is that the domain portion of the Contact URI is 
overridden with the real, received source IP of the request and that the 
default expectation of port 5060 (if not specified in the Contact URI) 
is dropped in favour of the actually received source UDP port. 
Similarly for SDP (without SIP-aware ALG).

I think the reason this would be frowned upon as a default is 
philosophical in essence;  by default, per the RFC, a SIP UAC is 
expected to behave such and such way, i.e. use the Contact URI that 
arrives in a REGISTER request and/or INVITE.  Overriding that with the 
received IP:port is a "hack" around prescribed behaviour, and enabling 
hacks as default behaviour is generally considered a bad idea.

-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
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