[Asterisk-Users] Broadvoice problems again

[Gregory Youngblood]

It appears * doesn't use both IP addresses returned by DNS for
sip.broadvoice.com as a failover method. Depending on how * works (I'm still
learning, and have been battling bad hardware it turns out...) you may be
able to use a work around.

This can help in several situations, but the downside is you no longer gain
the benefit of DNS. If they change IP addresses, and you don't check
periodically to make sure you have the new ones, you may end up with
problems. However, when you know one gateway is having issues, this will
prevent your system from accidentally using it.

In /etc/hosts, add an entry for the IP address that you want to use for
sip.broadvoice.com. For convenience, add all the IP addresses returned from
the nslookup, just comment out the one(s) you don't want to use. Then, in
theory, when * looks up the address for sip..., and if host.conf is set to
order hosts,bind, then * should use the address from the /etc/hosts file.

I have not done much with VoIP for a couple of years, but when I was, it was
pretty common for multiple IP addresses to be returned for a single FQDN.
This was the provider's way of providing redundancy, fail over capability,
and some measure of load balancing and control. 

The software and devices were supposed to be smart enough to use the list of
IP addresses in case a server stopped responding for any reason.

I ran into a similar problem, where the back end of one system was not
working, so my system would authenticate, but could never set up a call.
Using this method let me override the DNS and point to the provider's
machine(s) that I specified, effectively blocking the one that had problems.
[I could have also used firewall rules to block the bad machine, but I chose
not to for other reasons.]

As I said, this method is good for a temporary fix -- you should generally
try to use the DNS data and not rely on the hosts file long-term. Otherwise
you may not know about new servers or changing IP addresses until you run
into a service affecting problem and have an outage. 

Greg

> Deon Rodden
> 
> I see the issue. Mine says "Request Sent" and just hangs there.