Chris Farris - Geeklog

Cisco 7960 and ViaTalk

Posted on October 14th, 2006 by Chris Farris.
Categories: VOIP.

So I wanted to get a BYOD voip provider to move my vongage line to. One of the guys at work sent me a referral from ViaTalk. For $200 I get 2 years of service for about $16/mo. Unlimited minutes, voicemail, etc.

Well, when I tried to configure ViaTalk on the Cisco 7960 (firmware 8.3) the phone would lock up after about 12 minutes and require a powercycle to reboot. Not good. After rerouting and rewiring my network so I could ngrep the sip traffic, I discovered a large number of OPTIONs messages going to my phone. Could these OPTIONS messages be filling up a buffer causing the crash? My ETV line didn’t send lots of OPTIONS, nor did FWD or FONC.

I did some poking around and discovered Cisco has a new firmware version (8.4) out that fixed a bug titled “Phone may crash due to freeing message twice”. Sounds like what might be happening, so I upgraded my phone to 8.4.

That fixed ViaTalk. Unfortunately it broke ETV. Earthlink’s service uses port 5161 for SIP signaling, while most other VOIP services use 5060 (Vonage softphone uses 5061). Running ngrep I discovered that firmware v8.4 will send the REGISTER to the proxy_port specified in the config, however INVITEs are sent to port 5060. Since ETV doesn’t listen on port 5060 my INVITEs were getting dropped on the floor.

Might as well show my proxy configs for both lines:

line1_shortname: “ViaTalk”
line1_name: “16785551212″
line1_authname: “16785551212″
line1_password: “XXXXXXXXXX”
line1_displayname: “Chris Farris”
line1_contact : “UNPROVISIONED”
proxy1_address: “richmond-1.vtnoc.net”
proxy1_port: “5060″

line2_shortname: “ETV”
line2_name: “+16785551234″
line2_authname: “6785551234″
line2_password: “XXXXXXXXXX”
line2_displayname: “Chris Farris”
line2_contact : “UNPROVISIONED”
proxy2_address: “209.165.65.4″
proxy2_port: “5161″

So it seems clear that version 8.4 of the Cisco firmware will send line 2’s INVITEs to the proxy1_port. That’s annoying, as I do need to be able to dial out on my ETV line for testing. I’ve heard some rumors that the 8.x series of firmware is majorly b0rked so I may try to backtrack to 7.4 to see if I can get ViaTalk and ETV working together on the same phone.

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