STUN’d Into Silence

I’ve been traveling a lot lately so the phones around my home office have been idle. Even so, I was a little surprised to find that my snom m3 was not making or receiving calls this morning. Well, it was and it wasn’t. I could dial out and the call appeared to be placed, but I never heard any audio. Once clear of today’s VUC call with Dan Behringer, and lunch with my wife, I was able to investigate this further and get the matter resolved.

The trouble turned out to be a problem with the settings for the STUN server. The m3 needed a STUN server to work correctly with OnSIP. This contravenes the information in the OnSIP knowledgebase, which says to “Disable any STUN or ICE settings. “ In the 16 months that I’ve had the m3 it’s only ever worked correctly with a valid STUN server entered. In the past the STUN server that I always used was stun.fwdnet.net.

As of March 31st Free World Dialup has moved to a new operating platform. A paid member since last summer, I knew this from an email received a while ago. As I don’t use my FWD account for much it never occurred to me that the changes they were making would have any impact on my systems. I gather that they recently must have decommissioned their old STUN server. It wasn’t responding and so the little snom m3 was mute for at time.

A quick search of the VoIP Wiki revealed a vintage but nonetheless useful list of publicly available STUN servers. Looking at that list I recognized one of the servers listed as IdeaSIP, a supporter of our weekly VUC efforts. Dropping that STUN server setting into the m3 seems to have resolved that matter completely.