Important thing to bear in mind is that the Cisco best practice for remote 
endpoints was and still is to use VPN Phone via AnyConnect licensing, or in the 
newer endpoints via the Collaboration Edge architecture and Expressway. The 
phone determines if it can communicate directly to CUCM and if not it tries to 
establish an SSLVPN connection back to an ASA located at the provider edge, or 
in newer endpoints (8800 series for example) it establishes a session with 
Expressway just like a mobile device or tablet would. NAT across a WAN was 
never really a ‘thing’.

That being said, there are three config options related to NAT that you can try 
-

<natEnabled>true</natEnabled>
<natAddress>xx.xx.xx.xx</natAddress>
<natReceivedProcessing>true</natReceivedProcessing>

natAddress would be the phones local WAN IP address. Enabling 
natReceivedProcessing causes the phone to look at the 'received' tag in the via 
header of the 200 OK registration response for it's NAT address.

I am not sure if natEnabled actually forces symmetrical NAT or not. Would be 
easy enough to test and find out I guess.

If you think that the phone is requiring the reply to 5060 then you could also 
try rewriting the port on the outbound packets. Since the traffic didn’t 
originate from 5060 on the phone that would probably not be considered stateful 
and may require a static NAT on the firewall though.

WRT to the SOHO router ALG issue, you can try running an alternate SIP 
listening port. it breaks most of the ALGs and lets your SBC handle far-end NAT 
traversal as it should. It also allows for some security through obscurity. 
Guarantee your SIP scans will go down. Just make sure that you don’t select 
another well-known port.

I've almost never dealt with an instance where large deployments of unsupported 
endpoints turned out well. I realize that the usual tendency is for engineering 
to push back on a lot of requests, but there is good rationale for it in these 
cases. Allowing sales to force adoption of unsupported devices just so they can 
book revenue will usually result in a less than stellar onboarding experience, 
painful day one and beyond support issues, and a customer that leaves after a 
few months anyway wasting all of the dollars spent in engineering and 
operations to support the effort in the first place.

One way to get around these issues is to tie your product offering to your 
selected endpoints. Probably 70% of the folks on this board sell Polycom 
phones, why? Is there any functionality that you deliver with your whizzbang 
VVX600 that a customer can't get on a 15 year old 79xx?  Or a 2600 set with 
CENTREX features for that matter? OK, maybe BLF, but other than that probably 
not . . . If you develop a bespoke product offering that requires specific 
endpoints for delivery (presence integration, content delivery, video and 
collaboration features, integration with business systems) and train your sales 
force to sell based on value and using your unique feature set to wow and 
delight your customers, instead of selling on price point, then no customer 
will be able to build a strong business case for keeping their legacy 
endpoints. Not to mention that you have differentiated yourself from the other 
10,000 guys selling Broadworks and Polycom and elevated yourself above the 
commodity vendors.

Rob


From: VoiceOps [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mark Lindsey
Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2015 10:52 PM
To: Pete E
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Cisco 7941 SIP

1. In Hosted PBX, accommodating new, non-productized devices that the customer 
just has to keep is the price you pay to enjoy slow growth (because the 
engineering effort for the customer is immense), poor reliability (because you 
can test much less), and an unsupportable customer deployments (because the 
support team isn't equipped to support this "product").

2. In Hosted PBX, the demarc is the audible voice on the speaker and the input 
to the microphone. Supporting random devices the customer brings you makes it 
impossible for you to fulfill your end of the bargain: make this voice stuff 
work every time for every call.

3. The best thing to do with a customer's old device is trade in credit then 
liquidate.

4. Cisco 79xx SIP has gone back and forth on symmetric sip signaling over the 
past few decades. But generally, when nat is involved, the sip phone has to do 
symmetric sip ports -- I.e., it must use the same port numbers for both sending 
sip and receiving sip. (And when carrier SBCs are involved, it needs to use the 
same port number for all sip transactions, not just those related to direct 
call control).

But I remember Cisco 79xx configs having a "nat_enable" or similar flag that 
actually enable the symmetric sip.

mailto:[email protected]
tel:+1-229-316-0013 http://ecg.co/lindsey

On Oct 6, 2015, at 17:10, Pete E 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Greetings Voice Operators,


We have an interesting (code word for annoying) challenge that we've never 
dealt with before, probably because we don't do much with Cisco phones. We have 
a new customer coming on who wants to keep their very old Cisco 7941 phones. 
They have a few offices and the phones work as expected behind an Edgemarc. 
However, they also have 100+ home users, and that's where the issue comes in.

Apparently Cisco introduced a security "feature" where they create the session 
using a random high numbered port (e.g. 49123) but in the Via header, they say 
to respond to private IP, port 5060. So when the SBC sees the private address 
it assumes it is being NAT'd through a firewall and replies back to public IP, 
port 49123. What we're seeing is that the home router passes the response back 
to private IP, port 49123, which the phone doesn't accept (because it wants it 
on 5060) and the REGISTER fails.

As you know most home routers are poor at handling ALG (and we've tested and 
found they are equally bad at handling this scenario). We (and the customer) 
don't want to troubleshoot 100+ individual home routers.

We haven't found a way to turn off this really awesome "feature" so we're 
trying to find other solutions. Anyone been through this and have any 
suggestions?


Thanks,
Pete
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