asterisk users - Dec 2004 - Budgetone 101 phones ? SIP through NAT ?

I'm new to VOIP.  We are thinking of setting up a VOIP system between a
couple remote offices.  I've been lurking on this group for a while. 

What is the consensus on these phones:

http://www.netvoice.ca/grandstream/budgetone101.htm


I'm confused about the SIP protocol... can a SIP phone be located behind
a NATing firewall ?

When people use asterisk on a broadband connection used for data and
VOIP, do they put the asterisk machine behind a firewall or do they put
the firewall on the asterisk machine ?

Is anyone using QOS throttling when sharing VOIP and data on the same
broadband connection ?  Is it necessary ?  

Thanks.


-- 
Kim Lux (Mr.)  Diesel Research Inc

Kim Lux wrote:
>I'm new to VOIP.  We are thinking of setting up a VOIP system between a
>couple remote offices.  I've been lurking on this group for a while. 
>
>What is the consensus on these phones:
>
>http://www.netvoice.ca/grandstream/budgetone101.htm
>
>  
>
Cheap, but useable.  I'd go for the 102 model though, since it has a 2nd 
ethernet port.  It was listed as $124CA
>I'm confused about the SIP protocol... can a SIP phone be located behind
>a NATing firewall ?
>  
>
I'm currently testing 1 phone behind NAT.  Works fine.  The server is 
running in the office, linked between an OpenVPN connection (TAP) and 
NATted behind the TAP adapter's IP.
>When people use asterisk on a broadband connection used for data and
>VOIP, do they put the asterisk machine behind a firewall or do they put
>  
>
I'm playing around with 1 Asterisk box on my Mandrake Firewall, I've 
opened up 1 port to allow the firewall to contact the Office Asterisk 
server(Plan on trying to get inter-Asterisk boxes taking).  In a 
production environment though, it should be running on a separate box 
behind the firewall.
>Is anyone using QOS throttling when sharing VOIP and data on the same
>broadband connection ?  Is it necessary ?  
>
>  
>
I'm not yet.

Doug

>I'm new to VOIP.  We are thinking of setting up a VOIP system between a
>couple remote offices.  I've been lurking on this group for a while. 
>
>What is the consensus on these phones:
>
>http://www.netvoice.ca/grandstream/budgetone101.htm
>
>
>I'm confused about the SIP protocol... can a SIP phone be located behind
>a NATing firewall ?
>When people use asterisk on a broadband connection used for data and
>VOIP, do they put the asterisk machine behind a firewall or do they put
>the firewall on the asterisk machine ?
You will have a rather big problem doing that, you will likely end in the
one-way audio
scenario; to overcome that you may use STUN or TURN or an application level
gateway
(example: *). STUN is rather complicated to configure and I advise that only if
you
REALLY need it; never used TURN, but is almost the same. Now, you can put a
multihomed
machine (with an IP and posibly a NIC in each side of de fw), to do the passing
of the
calls to an external provider.

But if you will link different offices each one with an * server, use IAX2 in
the middle,
it doesn't suffer the on-way-audio-problem, it's NAT friendly (if you
have one or many in
the middle), and if you enable trunking, saves a good bunch of bandwidth for
each
additional conversation.
>Is anyone using QOS throttling when sharing VOIP and data on the same
>broadband connection ?  Is it necessary ?  
I use QOS to prevent de data traffic eating all the available bandwidth and
render VoIP
unusable. You can use a HTB with SFQ in each bucket, or a pfifo, or if you are
brave and
know what are about to do, use diffserv.
>Thanks.
Miguel Ruiz Velasco

====Miguel Ruiz Velasco

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