[asterisk-users] SIP - Authenticated vs Unauthenticated Calls

[Tim Nelson]

Greetings-

I'm running into an issue as follows, in simplified form:

A remote Asterisk box, when registered/peered via SIP to a central server, and makes a call to that central server, is *sometimes* authenticated and calls go through properly (via from-internal context), and *sometimes* is unauthenticated, and all calls are greeted with congestion() via the from-sip-external context. Yes, as you can tell, FreePBX is in play here too.

Grabbing captures of a working call vs a non-working call, I'm seeing on the working call, the central Asterisk server is responding to the INVITE with a 407 Proxy Authentication Needed, box responds, call goes through. On the non-working calls, the central Asterisk server is responding with a simple 100 Trying, then 200 OKs the session as it throws it into from-sip-external assuming the box is not authenticated.

So... and pardon my rambling above... why is this the case? In what circumstances would Asterisk respond to the same peer differently, seemingly at random?

I'm happy to provide any details required, but I'm having a brain freeze on what would be relevant at this point.

Thanks for any pointers or ideas!

--Tim