[Asterisk-Users] Re: asterisk + OH323 + NAT + gnomemeeting

[Jesse Guardiani]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 01:39:09 -0400, Karl J. Vesterling wrote:

> 
> H.323 will not traverse NAT.
> 
> Sorry...  I know, I was a big proponent of it when H.323 was the only 
> "standard" VoIP protocol out there.  Probably because when it came out NAT 
> wasn't even thought of.
> 
> The problem is that the control channel in H.323 discloses the internal IP 
> address, and the various connections attempt to connect to each other.  So 
> you wind up with problems like audio only in one direction, etc...

I thought SIP had the same problem though. Can't this be solved with
address translation inside asterisk? You know, like the externip,
localnet, and nat=yes options in sip.conf?

Or is it simply impossible due to limitations within the H.323 spec? It's
difficult to find information about this sort of thing on the internet.
H.323 is such a broad spec...


> Although I get get this to solve part of the problem back in year 2K:
> http://openh323proxy.sourceforge.net/
> It never solved the problem entirely, and I had a lot of H.323 equipment at 
> the time, so I was somewhat disappointed when the asterisk project said 
> integration with H.323 was impossible due to licensing issues.  (Bummer)...
> 
> Your best bet is to abandon H.323 and find something other than GnomeMeeting.
> 
> That is unless you want to carry a portable asterisk box with you...
> 
> Wait a sec...  COME TO THINK OF IT!
> Why not run asterisk on your linux box that you are running GnomeMeeting 
> on, and use it to convert between H.323 and IAX and SIP???
> 
> After all, it is a penguin...

That's certainly a good alternative. I'm currently in the process of
hacking up the latest linphone (1.0.1) to fix a few personal
show-stoppers. If I can get it to the point that I like it, then I'll
probably just go with linphone. But you're right. If it's took much work,
then I'll probably just start running asterisk on my laptop to do H.323 to
SIP conversions. Thanks for the suggestion! I hadn't thought of that yet.
I'd been looking at things like the commercial sip323 program, but I
hadn't thought of doing it with a local copy of asterisk.


-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
WingNET Internet Services,
P.O. Box 2605 // Cleveland, TN 37320-2605
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