Graves On SOHO VoIP

One project that I’m am about to start is moving from my m0n0wall router to a new one build around pfsense. The motivation for the project is the integration of our Comcast Business Class internet service into the rest of the household. At present there are two separate networks, with only a few devices enjoying the high speed cable service. The pfsense system will be configured for dual WAN, accessing both the cable service and Covad DSL circuit.

My existing m0n0wall runs on an old Soekris Net4801. In service for many years, it has been extremely reliable. If m0n0wall does what you need I have no hesitation in recommending the software. Support from the user community is tremendous as well.

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According to the pfSense blog there’s been an effort to implement Freeswitch as an installable package to pfSense. This is very interesting. There’s a long list of comments to the blog post which collectively spell out some of the merits of this idea, as well as how it relates to running an IP-PBX inside the LAN.

Some indicate a preference for Asterisk over Freeswitch. Others ask for a lightweight configuration supporting just a SIP proxy to an inside PBX. It’s noted that Freeswitch is a much larger application than siproxd, which would handle that well enough.

I’ve been considering giving pfSense a try. This is just one more good reason to make the effort some time soon.

I puzzles me how to see how many people find the diagram of my home/office network interesting. Yet it consistently gets a lot of traffic, so here’s an update to the original one I posted in March.

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After several months of thinking about it I finally got around to recording a screencast tutorial about setting up the traffic shaping feature in m0n0wall to accommodate VOIP traffic. Phillip Cooper’s series of screencasts were the inspiration for this. In going though his work (thank you!) it occurred to me that  documenting the settings that allow my VOIP systems might be useful to others.

I have a new (ish) Comcast cable modem service here in my office, which gave me a testbed to setup another router and go through the setup process from scratch.

The finished screencast is not online yet. I’ve passed it to the m0n0wall project leads for comment & revision before making it public. It should be available in the next few days.

So Netgear has released an open source router. Thus it has something to compete with the open source version of the venerable Linksys WRT-54GL. Garrett Smith has an interesting viewpoint on this. One that I’m inclined to agree with.

I’m not a typical user. I’m an early adopter. I don’t mind putting in some effort to making something work up to its promised potential. I also like open source, but I just don’t see the value in running 3rd party software on a hobbled router platform. It’s just not good use of my time.

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Sometimes the apparently simple, little things take longer than you’d expect. In my recent travels I’ve had some trouble when trying to VPN connect back to my home office. This generally happens for one of two reasons;

1. The ISP at the remote location is blocking related ports
2. The network at the remote location is on the same subnet range as my home office network

The first cause is something that I simply cannot control, but the second is something that I decided to address today. I moved my entire network onto a new subnet.

The process is simple enough. Make the required changes in the m0n0wall router and reboot just about everything. As much as possible I leave network devices with DHCP enabled and the reserve IP addresses in the routers DHCP server. Even so some things need hand tweaking.

For example, my wife tried to make a call only to find no dial tone on the house phone. It turns out that the Sipura SPA-2002 that we use with that phone had a hard coded DNS server entry. Oops. Gotta change that manually then dial tone returns.

Just to be safe I rebooted a lot of things and confirmed that they were back on the network and working correctly. I expect that we have more on-LAN devices than most homes. The process took a couple of hours.

Rarely do I profess as much devotion to a piece of software as I have for m0n0wall. I’m told that it’s one of the single most successful open source projects and it’s easy to see why. It’s been my primary router for over four years. It’s never let me down, and the user community is very supportive.

I am happy to see that Phillip Cooper has recently created a series of “screencasts” documenting it’s basic setup and configuration. This should help new users a lot. I wish they’d been around when I got started. I further wish that I’d thought to do the screencasts myself. It’s a good idea.

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For the past ten years I have worked from a home office full time. This has been the major motivation for my education in networking, and onward into VOIP technologies.

Since the middle of 2005 we have not used traditional land-lines (POTS) for either our home or office phones. Our transition to VOIP was not flawless, but with some lessons learned along the way the system has proven very reliable. Over the course of several posts I hope to pass on those lessons that have served us well so that others may also benefit.

The topics in the series are at present as follows:

• Some Installation Basics
• What is QoS?
• QoS Features in Small Routers
• Beyond QoS: Traffic Shaping
• Power Considerations

In the telling of this tale I will mention a number of devices many of which are not the current state-of-the-art. This doesn’t matter. I’m relating to you the actual devices I used. The principles will hold true for any similar current device.