[Asterisk-Users] Please help -- Syntax for dialing VoIP provider

[BK [address only for mailing lists]]

Hi Paul,

thanks for your insights

On Monday, July 7, 2003, at 03:59 PM, Paul Cheng wrote:

> To dial a PSTN number through Nikotel used to work from Asterisk, but 
> they had a very serious security issue (you could make calls anytime 
> anywhere and their billing wouldn't charge it) and after I informed 
> them of this, they changed their authentication mechanism and since 
> then I have not gotten it to work (they didn't even thank me!).

This is what we have discovered last night. However, We have got it 
working now.

I will document this in detail and make it available, but briefly here a 
quick summary ...

First I had various glitches in my dial string. With the help of John 
Todd and some others on the IRC #asterisk channel I was able to fix 
those glitches. Thanks everybody who assisted.

Then I tried a number of things I had already experimented with before. 
When I turned on SIP debug and watched the datagrams, I could see 
Nikotel's response "account name does not match address of record". 
Together with the "from" part, this led me to fiddle with "fromuser" 
again and when I set it to the actual login name, it worked.

> Their tech people said it should work with a slight change: "yes, we 
> changed it yesterday. Now the user part of the From: address has to be 
> the same as the username in the Proxy-Authentication line. I don't know 
> if the Asterisk can do that. The ATA186 does it b[y] default."
>
> This CAN be done if you edit chan_sip.c,

It would seem you can do it a lot simpler:

in sip.conf
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
register => myusername:mypassword at calamar0.nikotel.com

[nikotel]
username=myusername
fromuser=myusername
...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

> but when I did this, it billed me a few times for unconnected calls

Thanks for sharing this with us. I will watch this for a while and see 
if this happens here too.

>  and I gave up trying to debug and switched to iConnect. iConnect is 
> worse quality, but it is very easy to connect to.
>
> I had much better quality with calls via Nikotel than iConnect, but 
> their support is non-existent/bad at best. I sent them 3-4 e-mails 
> about their security issue before they even responded.

Yes, support is not exactly their strength, is it?!

> FYI. Registering with Nikotel was futile anyways, because I never 
> figured out how anyone could call into me.

I don't want anybody to call in via Nikotel. Since they do not provide a 
telephone number for incoming calls, the only calls you could possibly 
get are from their public chat room. In the very best case you get a 
friendly test call from somebody who has just signed up and wants to try 
out the service, in the worst case you get prank calls in the middle of 
the night or indecent proposals and all the rest of it.

I will have to find a way to disable incoming calls from Nikotel 
entirely.


> iConnect provides a PSTN-SIP dial in as an option, but I haven't tried 
> it.

Yes, I have seen that. And at $8.95/mth it would seem reasonably priced, 
too.

> Outbound calls do not require registering.
>
> I can provide examples of iConnect connection scripts if you contact me 
> offline.

Thanks, I will do that.

again many thanks to everybody who has helped solving this riddle
rgds
bk