[Asterisk-Users] Unblocking incoming SIP

[Andy Powell]

On 31/05/2004 at 10:47 Eric Wieling wrote:

>On Mon, 2004-05-31 at 10:16, Duane wrote:
>> Andy Powell wrote:
>> 
>> > Anything that's added to * that breaks how protocols work should be by
>default OFF not ON, 
>> > but that's just IMO...
>> 
>> I agree 100%, this has been very frustrating trying to work out why 
>> Asterisk suddenly stopped accepting calls from FWD and other PSTN based 
>> services.
>> 
>> I very much preferred the old method, if I didn't want to accept a SIP 
>> call you just don't have a matching context.
>
>The problem is that too many people had a context= in [general] and
>didn't realize that incoming SIP calls that didn't match anything would
>be accepted and sent to the context= that was specified in [genera].
>

which is why everywhere you look in the guides etc people say put something like:

context=boguscalls

in the general section, which (providing you weren't stupid enough to create a
[boguscalls] section worked well... in fact I'll go as far as quoting my own guide:

"An important point here, if you do not have a sip aware firewall and are just using port forwarding then ensure that your context points to somewhere like ‘invalidcalls’. If you do not do this then someone could call one of your extensions direct from the Internet. If you had an FXO card in the machine, this could lead to them being able to make PSTN calls"

Those people that "didn't realize" were more than likely using a guide to set up... 

I still stand by the fact that this feature should have been OFF in the first place.

Andy