[asterisk-dev] Asterisk 1.6 peer matching working differently

[Johansson Olle E]

Friends, co-developers and users,

We had a discussion here in Huntsville (yes, the vikings are invading  
the dev team over here again) yesterday about the changes done to  
chan_sip device matching. Steve Murphy's code means a HUGE improvement  
over the old linked lists that bogged down large installations and is  
a huge step forward, but...

During last week, in the Asterisk SIP Masterclass, I realized that  
there was one area I hadn't discussed with Steve and we want to  
consult the rest of the community to see how important this is for  
you. Please try to follow this logic.

Today, we match on peers on IP address and port for incoming calls by  
traversing the list of SIP peers from top to bottom. In the top of the  
list, we have the last defined peer in sip.conf. So we match sip.conf  
[peers] from bottom up. This is something I've covered in multiple bug  
reports, multiple e-mails on mailing lists and in my trainings -  
instructing users to use the last peer, because that's the context  
where the call will end up.

This really affects you if you have multiple registrations with one  
service provider. Even if you have multiple peer definitions that you  
use for outbound calls, only the last one will be used for inbound  
calls. We have code in the works to fix this issue, but that's how it  
works today.

With the new code in svn trunk (not 1.6.0) we will match any peer by  
using hatches. We can't really say which one.

The big question here is:
- Will this break your configurations?
- Is this breaking backwards compatibility or is it non-important? Do  
we need to find a way to restore this functionality, or can we just  
ask users to add the right context for each peer while we're waiting  
for the final solution to this problem?

Looking forward to your insightful feedback as always!

Greetings from Huntsville!

/Olle