@lgaetz Thanks for your reply again. I do want to say that I am listening to you and the others who respond on this channel and I truly appreciate the expertise and dedication you bring to FreePBX, especially in this VERY difficult time. I might be mis-informed but my questions are honest appeals for assistance. (I may be relatively new to FreePBX, but I’m not new to computer support.)
Firstly, to my statement that “having a third party firewall in front of FreePBX means that things probably won’t work” I refer to the statement (in red ink) when enabling the Sangoma Smart Firewall in FreePBX that says:
“To receive the full benefits of the Sangoma Smart Firewall, you should ensure that no other firewall is intercepting traffic to this machine. This is normally accomplished by configuring your internet connection to place this machine in the ‘DMZ’ of your gateway. If you are unable to do this, it is unlikely that Responsive Firewall will work correctly, if at all.”
Apologies if I mis-interpreted what the statement above says, but I have a hard time understanding that putting FreePBX behind a pfSense firewall is not a good idea. Anyway, enough on that.
However I completely agree with you and admit that I am wrong to make assumptions about things not working when relying on only two data points. You’re the one with the years of support expertise and if you say it’s likely that half of providers would have similar issues, and that nothing can be done at the PBX to compensate for router/firewall misconfig, I totally believe that. 'Nuff said.
Another comment. You say: “You have configured your router for a specific SIP use case, one that works for the majority of calls using one provider but not another.” In this particular case, with VoIP.ms, using VoIP trunks and a VoIP.ms DID, the fact is I have NOT configured pfSense at all, period. Nothing, no SIP or UDP ports forwarded, etc. In this case, I got lucky and everything just worked.
Now on to the link to SIP Port Forwarding provided above. Your post from Nov. '17 is clear and well-written and you clear up a mis-conception I had that port forwarding is unnecessary with FreePBX. I’m no firewall expert, but configuring port forwarding in pfSense isn’t terribly complicated and I believe I had forwarded UDP ports 10k-20K correctly in pfSense. That was reinforced when, in the Connectivity Test in SIPSTATION, the test would fail when port forwarding of ports 10k-20k in pfSense was toggled off, and pass when port forwarding was toggled on. If the connectivity test produces false positives, I expect this to be explained somewhere.
One thing you mention in your Nov '17 post is the test you do from the Asterisk CLI:
channel originate local/[email protected] application echo
When I perform the channel originate command to the VoIP.ms DID with the working VoIP.ms trunks, both with and without UDP ports 10k-20k forwarded on pfSense, there is no echo as you predicted.
Can you point me to additional logs, or debug flags, etc., so I can further troubleshoot this issue?