[Asterisk-Users] How do you handle NAT?

[Ray Van Dolson]

We've been feeling our way along with the NAT stuff (using SIP) as well.

At this point we are fairly small, so the keep-alive packets are not too bad.
What type of user load are you at and what are the specs on your Asterisk box?
I'm concerned we may run into this as well.

We do have the luxury that each Sipura device we use is sitting behind its own
NAT (a customer CPE).  So we can do port-forwarding and in combination with a
STUN server (MyStun), things work quite well.  The only issues left to deal
with are a lingering problem with ip_conntrack entries staying cached because
of the "keep alive" packets due to qualify=yes after the CPE's IP address
changes.

Curious to hear other's setups as well.  I would *love* to start using the
IAXy instead, but it has a couple shortcomings over the Sipura 2002's we're
using now:

- About $10/more
- Only has one line (apparently two lines is a bit more of a selling point).

Still trying to figure out a good way to make a case for the IAXy though.

Ray

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 09:59:49AM -0500, Matthew Boehm wrote:
> We are interested in how other people are handling NAT problems. We have 
> several customers all of which have some sort of firewall/NAT device at 
> their location. For simplicity sake, all customers' internal networks 
> are 192.168.*.*.
> 
> Our asterisk box is on public IP not blocked by any FW/NAT.
> 
> I use QUALIFY=yes on all our customers' phones and I feel that sending 
> out 80-something keep-alive packets is causing our box to crawl and 
> cause bad calls.
> 
> Would SER be better in this case? Should I have phones register with SER 
> instead of with Asterisk?
> 
> Thanks,
> Matthew
> 
> P.S. Yes, I have read stuff on NAT on the wiki. I'm more interested in 
> other real world, working, solutions.