Getting ready to setup a new Sangoma FreePBX phone system 100. I have technical support experience in PBX but I have never setup one before and was hoping for some best practices as the previous Sys admin did it wrong. So first thing is I am running a Sangoma A101E PRI card in this system. Does the system come with the drivers for it pre-installed? or do I need to go get them? IF so where do I get them?
Past that I am looking to set it up correctly so does the PRI card go behind a firewall? or does it go directly to the T1 connection and he FreePBX’s firewall does the work? I have remote sites as well and from what I gather VPNs are the way to go for remote sites? is this true?
I have used the a101 controller many times with a PRI. In this situation the a101 gets connected directly to the smart jack (the pri) that was provided. This is not internet, this is pri technology so no firewall or anything of the sort is used.
Drivers are preinstalled, the wiki walks you through the setup process. I always used the setup-sangoma command at the command prompt to set mine up.
Vpn is a very safe way to go and the way I implement all remote sites customers might have. I use a pfsense firewall at each end and create an IPSec tunnel.
Quick follow up question. I saw on forum that NAT causes issues with remote phones. Does the VPN resolve this matter? For instance I have a site that is NAT through a single IP and I notice that my latency on a local phone is around 30 ms and these NAT phones hover around 100 ms. Does the VPN resolve this matter?
It depends on the underlying network architecture. The latency will depend on lots of things like speed, bandwidth, and switching/routing technologies. In a general answer to your question, a VPN is seldom likely to resolve these underlying issues - a VPN is almost never faster than a routed connection, since they are traversing the same network and the VPN actually adds (minor) latency to the connection.
Having said that: try it. There’s plenty of free VPN software out there. Set one up and see if it improves your traffic times. My suspicion is that you are going to see an increase in travel time on the order of 10ms, but there’s no guarantee that it won’t solve your problem by skirting around possible problems in your network.
Network backbone wise the only limitations I have would be the phones themselves at 10/100 everything else is at or close to 10/100/1000. The traffic between the two sites rarely has much traffic at all mostly is used for network shares, some AD replication,email, and phones. It is not subject to bandwidth throttling by ISP as it is just across the street. They are connected via airFibre radios. I guess it could be the remote router but I will definitely give it a shot.