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Posted by William P.N. Smith on April 17, 2006, 7:50 pm
I'm designing my first Asterisk system, and I'm a bit stuck on where
to put the server. I've got a bunch of Polycom phones
and a Linksys SRW224P Poe switch, and I'm building a box to run
A@Home...
I have some public static IPs available, and I have NAT router(s)
providing internet access to my LAN, so I can either give the PBX a
static IP or put it on my LAN, but I can't figure out what's the
'right' thing to do.
Obviously I want to put the phones on the LAN, so I can move them
around to any network jack, and they can supply LAN connectivity to
connected computers. Therefore the phones will be behind my NAT
router getting IP addresses in the 192.168.1.x subnet.
I figure I can either:
A) Put the PBX behind the NAT router. This puts the phones on the
same subnet as the PBX, and adds some additional security by putting
the PBX behind a (hardware) firewall. The downside is that there are
ports to open in the firewall, and my impression is that connecting
phones in other locations is more difficult and/or prone to problems.
B) Put the PBX out on the net with a static IP, but then don't the
phones have to do the (STUN?) NAT Traversal thing to get to their PBX?
C) I suppose I could play some games with DMZ on a cheap router, but
that feels like the worst of both worlds...
D) There's probably something I can do with VLANs on the switch, but
that's a rathole, I can't find any good VLAN references, and I really
don't want to try to learn too many things at once. 8*|
Anyway, I'd really appreciate some hints or general guidance from the
experts here!
Thanks!
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Posted by Enzo Michelangeli on April 17, 2006, 8:33 pm
The scenario B) is definitely the best. In Asterisk's sip.conf, in the
sections for the phones behind the NAT, set "nat=yes"; do NOT enable STUN
on the phones, because that would likely prevent communications among
internal phones if canreinvite=yes in also set for them in sip.conf . In
fact, canreinvite=no is the safest choice anyway, even though it may
slightly increase the latency by forcing all the traffic to flow through
Asterisk.
If you put Asterisk behind the NAT, you are going to have endless
problems: port forwarding with SIP is not enough, as IP addresses are
transmitted in ASCII inside the payload. Some modern routers have "SIP
helper" modules able to modify them on the fly, similarly to what is done
with FTP, but don't count of it. Dealing with NAT traversal is where IAX
shines in comparison with SIP.
Even better would be to use as router the Linux box where Asterisk runs,
and have Asterisk bind to 0.0.0.0. This way, neither internal nor external
connections would be NATted...
For more details, see: http://www.voip-forum.com/?p=131&more=1 (under "SIP
and NAT - what is the problem, really?") and the scenarios described at
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+SIP+NAT+solutions .
Enzo
> I'm designing my first Asterisk system, and I'm a bit stuck on where
> to put the server. I've got a bunch of Polycom phones
> and a Linksys SRW224P Poe switch, and I'm building a box to run
> A@Home...
> I have some public static IPs available, and I have NAT router(s)
> providing internet access to my LAN, so I can either give the PBX a
> static IP or put it on my LAN, but I can't figure out what's the
> 'right' thing to do.
> Obviously I want to put the phones on the LAN, so I can move them
> around to any network jack, and they can supply LAN connectivity to
> connected computers. Therefore the phones will be behind my NAT
> router getting IP addresses in the 192.168.1.x subnet.
> I figure I can either:
> A) Put the PBX behind the NAT router. This puts the phones on the
> same subnet as the PBX, and adds some additional security by putting
> the PBX behind a (hardware) firewall. The downside is that there are
> ports to open in the firewall, and my impression is that connecting
> phones in other locations is more difficult and/or prone to problems.
> B) Put the PBX out on the net with a static IP, but then don't the
> phones have to do the (STUN?) NAT Traversal thing to get to their PBX?
> C) I suppose I could play some games with DMZ on a cheap router, but
> that feels like the worst of both worlds...
> D) There's probably something I can do with VLANs on the switch, but
> that's a rathole, I can't find any good VLAN references, and I really
> don't want to try to learn too many things at once. 8*|
> Anyway, I'd really appreciate some hints or general guidance from the
> experts here!
> Thanks!
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Posted by Jonathan Roberts on April 18, 2006, 8:07 am
William:
I may be pointing out the obvious but.... Be sure to secure your Asterisk
box if you put it on a static IP or in the DMZ. I have a test box in the
DMZ and gets pounded all day and night by people trying to get into it.
Jonathan
> I'm designing my first Asterisk system, and I'm a bit stuck on where
> to put the server. I've got a bunch of Polycom phones
> and a Linksys SRW224P Poe switch, and I'm building a box to run
> A@Home...
> I have some public static IPs available, and I have NAT router(s)
> providing internet access to my LAN, so I can either give the PBX a
> static IP or put it on my LAN, but I can't figure out what's the
> 'right' thing to do.
> Obviously I want to put the phones on the LAN, so I can move them
> around to any network jack, and they can supply LAN connectivity to
> connected computers. Therefore the phones will be behind my NAT
> router getting IP addresses in the 192.168.1.x subnet.
> I figure I can either:
> A) Put the PBX behind the NAT router. This puts the phones on the
> same subnet as the PBX, and adds some additional security by putting
> the PBX behind a (hardware) firewall. The downside is that there are
> ports to open in the firewall, and my impression is that connecting
> phones in other locations is more difficult and/or prone to problems.
> B) Put the PBX out on the net with a static IP, but then don't the
> phones have to do the (STUN?) NAT Traversal thing to get to their PBX?
> C) I suppose I could play some games with DMZ on a cheap router, but
> that feels like the worst of both worlds...
> D) There's probably something I can do with VLANs on the switch, but
> that's a rathole, I can't find any good VLAN references, and I really
> don't want to try to learn too many things at once. 8*|
> Anyway, I'd really appreciate some hints or general guidance from the
> experts here!
> Thanks!
|
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Posted by William P.N. Smith on April 18, 2006, 8:26 am
>I may be pointing out the obvious but.... Be sure to secure your Asterisk
>box if you put it on a static IP or in the DMZ. I have a test box in the
>DMZ and gets pounded all day and night by people trying to get into it.
Yeah, also
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk@Home+Handbook+Wiki+Chapter+7#7223PolycomandNATSWelcometohellatleastas
seems to say that my phones won't do NAT traversal very well, and (at
least in the beginning) I'll be using the PBX with POTS lines, so
maybe I'll put it inside the firewall to start with and see how it
goes...
Thanks for the feedback, all!
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Posted by Wolfgang S. Rupprecht on April 18, 2006, 3:06 pm
> Yeah, also
>
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk@Home+Handbook+Wiki+Chapter+7#7223PolycomandNATSWelcometohellatleastas
> seems to say that my phones won't do NAT traversal very well, and (at
> least in the beginning) I'll be using the PBX with POTS lines, so
> maybe I'll put it inside the firewall to start with and see how it
> goes...
My personal feeling is that phones and asterisk should really be on
real static IP's so that they can re-invite and have a faster direct
talk-path. Putting your phones inside a NAT-ing firewall forces you
to turn off re-invites and leaves asterisk in your talk-path. If the
machine gets busy and asterisk gets delayed by a few 100ms, audio will
"hiccup".
For security reasons you should run asterisk as some powerless user in
a chroot jail. This is a bit fiddley to set up, but well worth it if
some script kiddie finds an exploitable asterisk bug. And asterisk
does have plenty of questionable code for kiddies to try to find some
way to exploit. Look at the large number of system(...) calls. All
of those are accidents waiting to happen.
-wolfgang
--
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
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> to put the server. I've got a bunch of Polycom phones
> and a Linksys SRW224P Poe switch, and I'm building a box to run
> A@Home...
> I have some public static IPs available, and I have NAT router(s)
> providing internet access to my LAN, so I can either give the PBX a
> static IP or put it on my LAN, but I can't figure out what's the
> 'right' thing to do.
> Obviously I want to put the phones on the LAN, so I can move them
> around to any network jack, and they can supply LAN connectivity to
> connected computers. Therefore the phones will be behind my NAT
> router getting IP addresses in the 192.168.1.x subnet.
> I figure I can either:
> A) Put the PBX behind the NAT router. This puts the phones on the
> same subnet as the PBX, and adds some additional security by putting
> the PBX behind a (hardware) firewall. The downside is that there are
> ports to open in the firewall, and my impression is that connecting
> phones in other locations is more difficult and/or prone to problems.
> B) Put the PBX out on the net with a static IP, but then don't the
> phones have to do the (STUN?) NAT Traversal thing to get to their PBX?
> C) I suppose I could play some games with DMZ on a cheap router, but
> that feels like the worst of both worlds...
> D) There's probably something I can do with VLANs on the switch, but
> that's a rathole, I can't find any good VLAN references, and I really
> don't want to try to learn too many things at once. 8*|
> Anyway, I'd really appreciate some hints or general guidance from the
> experts here!
> Thanks!