On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 1:40 AM, Rob <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for this explanation, but it leaves me quite confused.
Uhh, I'll try to explain better. > I have 5 PCs here behind a NAT router as a home network. > I extensively use Secure Shell (SSH) as my means of communication > to computers outside and inside. > > If SSH would operate like Ekiga, only one instance of SSH is allowed > from my home network. However, I've never encountered problems > with the number of SSH connections (and I have many connections > simultaneously active!). First of all, the ssh you launch from the terminal is the client - it is only making connections to other computers, not accepting incoming connections. The latter is done by sshd and normally there is only one sshd running on each computer, because only one application is allowed to bind and listen on a particular IP:port combination. You can try it out yourself with nc: >From one terminal: [d...@sunc ~]$ nc -l 1234 # listen on INADDR_ANY:1234 >From another terminal: [d...@sunc ~]$ nc -l 1234 # listen on INADDR_ANY:1234 nc: Address already in use [d...@sunc ~]$ However Ekiga (and any other VoIP software for that matter) is both client *and* server. It is both making "connections" to other computers as well as listening on SIP standard port (which is 5060) for incoming calls. Thus if you want to run multiple Ekiga instances on the same computer you need to configure them to listen on different ports (same thing with SSH - if you want to run multiple sshd's you need them to listen on different ports). One can argue that the second (third etc) instance of Ekiga should be able to detect that port 5060 is taken and use a different port. > Therefore, I find it difficult to believe that Ekiga doesn't have an automatic > built-in solution for several Ekiga logins behind a NAT router, since > other software seems to have no problems with that too..... Actually NAT shouldn't matter here at all, as long as STUN and UDP tracking on the router is working and there are no restrictions on ekiga.net or whatever VoIP provider you're using (I have a Cisco CallManager at work which limits the number of accounts to one per IP address). Ekiga running on multiple computers behind NAT should work just fine. > Moreover, I try to switch from Skype to Ekiga; I have 4 Skype logins > active at the moment, 2 on the same PC and another 2 on different > PCs. All behind the same NAT router. No problems or clashes! Skype obviously is listening on an a random unused port and advertising the IP and port to other Skype users through it's infrastructure. That's why it's possible to have multiple Skype logins on the same PC. Technically Ekiga is doing the same - it is using different port (that is also different from the default one) for each configured account and advertising it via registration. Just for some reason it desperately wants to listen on the default port as well. As I mentioned it can be argued that listening on 5060 is not that critical and Ekiga should automagically choose a different port if 5060 is taken. Anyway the Ekiga is already using different ports for each account, and the only thing listening on 5060 is required for is direct IP dialling. I don't think many people are using this feature, it's kinda irrelevant with DHCP-assigned IPs and hey, we have mDNS for calling people on the same LAN. Now to sum up: As already said, multiple Ekiga logins on different PCs behind the same NAT should just work without any additional setup. If it doesn't then it's a totally different problem related to NAT traversal. To get multiple Ekiga logins working on the same PC (but with different users, like you described), try changing the /apps/ekiga/protocols/sip/listen_port (assuming you're using only SIP) to something different than 5060 for one of the users (eg 5070, the easiest way to do that is with gconf-editor - yum install gconf-editor and it will show up in Applications/System Tools as Configuration Editor). If that doesn't do the trick, try changing /apps/ekiga/protocols/h323/listen_port as well, just to shut it up. If you still get the same error after that I consider it a bug in Ekiga. Running multiple Ekiga instances on the same PC and same user is not possible but I see no reason why would one want to do that as you can have multiple accounts active at the same time. I hope this helps. Best, -- Ian _______________________________________________ ekiga-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/ekiga-list
