Sip Registration fails often

I’m new and have freepbx working using e4sip. I have had 3 instances in the last 2 weeks when the sip registration fails at the provider and of course the system doesn’t work. I have reported it to them each time and by the time they reply it had started working. and they say nothing is wrong.
Have I picked a bad provider or is there a way to find out what the sip registration failing is caused by? I’m connected through Comcast Business and I have asked that they not block any ports and they said that has been done. The fact it works at all I suppose means they are correct but why is this failing so often the same way.

Do failed registrations result in an error, or is there simply no response? If the former, what do the Asterisk logs show? If the latter, have you tried pings or similar to see whether network connectivity to the provider has been lost? Once lost, how long does it typically take to register successfully?

I don’t know anything about e4sip, but most providers will accept outbound calls without registration. Have you tried this?

You might want to sign up with a second provider, as both a backup and a troubleshooting aid. Take a look at Flowroute and (if your IP address is static or de facto static) AnveoDirect. Both give a small credit at signup, so you can test without making a payment. On Flowroute, the $0.25 credit won’t last long, but calls to US toll-free numbers are free; limiting your test calls to those will allow you to test indefinitely. On AnveoDirect, no calls are free but toll-free and calls to most US mobiles are less than $0.002/min.; the $0.60 credit gives you >300 minutes of testing.

If access to two providers is lost at the same time, you almost certainly have a network issue or a problem with the PBX itself. You can try configuring your IP phone or other VoIP device to register directly with e4sip and see whether those registrations are also problematic.

What happens is that I get a call from the user that the phones are down because they tried to make a call and couldn’t. I go looking into it and see on the provider site that “SIP Registration has failed” . Having seen this multiple times while working through building this system, I know that it means the phones wont work, but I don’t know where the break is. My box, the internet provider, or the sip server. E4SIP is S-L-O-W to respond and I of course am panicking. I dont drink so all i can do is ask arouns to those who know how this stiff works in the real world. Maybe this is how this works… maybe E4SIP is a lousy provider , maybe Comcast Business internet is causing me trouble with port blocking or who knows what. (hey, they did it with Netflix…)

A Second provider would be interesting but how would I configure the incoming number to point to 2 providers?

You can’t here from there, but the problem isn’t probably with your ITSP.

Logs would come in handy for troubleshooting this. It could be something simple like your router is timing the session out.

Sorry, I know nothing about e4sip. However, this is a pretty strange message. If your PBX is registered and (e.g. because of network trouble) it can’t refresh the registration and it expires, then from the provider’s point of view nothing has ‘failed’, the registration simply expired and the device isn’t registered anymore. If they are saying that registration was rejected (e.g. wrong password) then they should be able to tell you what error they detected.

What do the Asterisk logs show at the time of failure? What does
pjsip show registrations
or (if the trunk is using chan_sip instead of pjsip)
sip show registry
show when it’s not working?

If you don’t know how to interpret the logs and don’t want to learn, IMO you should get some paid support from Sangoma or from an independent consultant. Or, post them here and someone might be able to help.

I assume that e4sip has some sort of failover mechanism that you can set up on their portal. When the PBX doesn’t respond, they will forward the call to another destination that you specify. Although this could be a DID with a second provider, I’d initially recommend that you forward to the user’s mobile so he won’t miss an important call and will know that the system is having trouble. The Outbound Route can include the second provider’s trunk. If calls properly fail over when e4sip registration has been lost, that’s useful info and it will keep the customer happy while you find out what’s wrong. If the call via the backup provider also fails, you’ll know it’s probably a networking issue.

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I started a new thread. I think I might have been hacked. I attached a log excerpt.

You generally can’t get a number registered to two providers at once, but there are two things that you can do:

  1. get a number at the second provider that you can call to to make sure that you can receive calls at all.
  2. setup a failover at your primary provider that, when your FreePBX box isn’t registered, calls are forwarded to the phone number at your second provider. (see #1). This should show up in your CDR logs as phone calls to your secondary phone number, so you can track how often things are broken.

Stewart1 - I would like it if they would email me when it expired for any reason. It just shouldn’t do that. Next time it fails I’ll try to grab that info

Darkonc - I’ll look into that. Thank you. E4SIP support is almost always minimum 24 hour turnaround. That’s a long time when there is an outage. I didn’t see a failover option but asking the question may put a fire under them.

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