Posts Tagged ‘vpn’
» posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 17:44 by Nigel
Nokia E72 step by step VoIP and VPN setup for 3CX
I’ve just had a clear out of unnecessary crud from my mobile phone, and took the opportunity to set everything up from scratch, so you can see exactly how easy it is to get something like a Nokia E72 (or pretty much anything with S60 v3 Feature Pack 2) working as an extension for an IP phone system.
Don't be put off by the 'advanced' tag - setting up VoIP on Symbian is easy
First, you’ll need Nokia’s SIP VoIP Settings app. Download and install this onto the phone, then from the menu choose ‘Ctrl. Panel’ and ‘Net Settings’. You’ll see a new ‘Advanced VoIP settings’ option here. Select that, and on the next screen pick ‘Create new service’ and when the pop-up appears, choose ‘Create new SIP profile.’
All you need to enter is your SIP ID and password
Now, you’re asked for the username – if this is extension 107 and the 3CX (or other VoIP) server is sip.mycompany.com, you type in 107@sip.mycompany.com. You’ll then be asked for the password, and then if you want to search for wireless networks.
It’s a good idea if you’ve saved the wireless network in your phone before starting VoIP setup, so you won’t have to enter the password here. Once the connection to the network has been established, you’ll see a screen with the message ‘Activate service’, and selecting that may connect you to the VoIP service.
In the case of 3CX, it probably won’t – there’s one more setting you need to change. So, go back to the Net Settings tool, select Advanced VoIP settings again, SIP settings, and then the name of your sip server, eg sip.mycompany.com. Scroll down to ‘Proxy server’, select it, and on the next screen, enter the name of the 3CX server in the ‘Proxy server address’ box.
Set up your wifi connections first - it's easier
Now you’re done. You can sign on to the phone system in two ways; first, open Contacts, press left on the nav pad to get to the menu at the top of the screen, and select your SIP server there, then select ‘Activate service.’ You can sign out in a similar way.
Activate VoIP accounts via the Contacts app, or just by dialling
Alternatively, just enter a number on the phone, and the right hand soft key will be labelled ‘Net call.’ Press that, and you’ll be asked if you want to connect to the internet telephony service; choose Yes to sign on and make the call.
Out and about
So far, so good, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, connecting through firewalls can be tricky where VoIP is concerned, and using a VPN can make life simpler.
I’m using Telexy’s SymNC (which is a bundle of tools that includes SymVPN, which I mentioned the last time I talked about this). On the 3CX system, create a network connection for incoming connections, and specify a user name and password for it – you use the New Connection wizard in the Windoows Network Connections control panel, chose the advanced option, and ‘Accept incoming connections.’ I reserved a pair of IP addresses for the connection, one for each end. If you have lots of remote users, you’ll need more.
SymNC includes Telexy's SymVPN app
Now, start SymNC on the phone, scroll down to ‘Settings’ and click OK. On the next screen, select ‘PPTP VPN’ – if you’ve just got SymVPN rather than the whole suite, this is the same as launching SymVPN.
The screen that appears is blank except for an ‘up’ folder. Press Options and choose Add new, then enter a name. This will be a Symbian network destination, like the access points for your mobile phone network; a name like HomeLan probably won’t clash.
After the name, select the access point to use, which will be your phone company’s mobile data service, and for ‘Host’ enter the name of the 3CX system (or the other system you set up to listen for incoming connections).
Select your phone company's access point, then enter your VPN host name
Below Host is the account option; this takes you to a new screen, where you choose ‘Add new’ once again, and enter the user name and password you created on the Windows server. Click Done to return to the previous screen, and Done again to return to the main VPN screen.
Now, select the entry you just created, click OK and select Verify. After a short pause, you should see a confirmation screen telling you the assigned IP address, DNS server and other information for your network. If this is fine, then VPN should work.
There’s one last thing to do. Go to the ‘Ctrl. Panel’ on the phone, select Settings, Connection, then Destinations. There will be an ‘Uncategorised’ option at the bottom of the list. Open this, and you’ll see the ‘HomeLan’ access point you created for the VPN. Use the Organise option to move it into the Destination for your VoIP service, which will be called sip.mycompany.com. It will be added to the bottom of the list there, and automatically used when the wireless network is unavailable.
Move the new access point to the one named for your sip server, and you're done
Try this out by either switching off the wireless network, or going outside the range, and dialling a number, then pressing ‘Net call.’ The first time, you may be asked if you want to allow the access point ‘HomeLan’ to be used automatically in future. Choose Yes, and after a short pause while the VPN is setup, you should be connected to your phone system.
If you have issues with caller ID, I covered some of those earlier.
one Comment | filed under Networking · VoIP | tags: 3cx, e72, nokia, symbian, telexy, VoIP, vpn
» posted on Saturday, June 5th, 2010 at 20:38 by Nigel
Going mobile with VoIP and SymVPN
A break (and probably quite a welcome one) from surround sound on Freeview this weekend, with a little more tinkering with the VoIP phone system. One of the theoretical benefits of using a phone system like 3CX is that you can have remote extensions.
Put simply, that means that as long as there’s an internet connection, you can plug in a VoIP phone anywhere, and it will connect to the phone system. So, I could be working in someone’s office, and if there’s an internet connection, I can have my usual phone with me, so when someone calls my business phone number, it would ring wherever I am, anywhere in the world. Of course you can do that with call forwarding, but with VoIP there are no call charges, and you can do things like transfer a call to a different extension too.
Now, it would be a bit tedious to carry a desk phone with me, but my Nokia E72 has VoIP built in, and can connect via WiFi; I’ve used that with previous phones in the past to avoid roaming charges when abroad, and when I’m at home the E72 connects to the 3CX phone system perfectly.
Unfortunately, VoIP is very picky when it comes to firewalls, and unless things are configured properly, you end up with problems like audio only working in one direction – and that’s exactly what I’ve been experiencing when trying to make the E72 work when I’m away from home. I’ve tried the usual solutions, but without being able to alter the settings on some of the networks where I use the phone, it’s hard to be sure it will always work.
Step forward the VPN
Since the phone works perfectly when it’s connected to my home network, a VPN is a potential solution, since it can make the phone look as if it is connected there, and the E72 has a built in VPN client, while my new Draytek broadband router has a VPN server that supports IPSec, PPTP and L2TP.
The standard Nokia client uses IPSec, which is a bit of a pig to configure in my view. It made my head hurt and generally and drove me to distraction, so I opted instead for Telexy’s SymVPN which does PPTP, and has a two week free trial.
That’s much simpler to configure, and it didn’t take very long at all to have the phone connecting to the router, and signing in to the 3CX phone system. Unfortunately, that’s as far as I got – there was still just one way audio. I think that is something to do with address allocation on the Draytek and how it handles public IP addresses – my network doesn’t use NAT. I’m sure it could be fixed given time, but in between other work, I had only three days of the SymVPN trial left.
So, I’ve opted for the alternative – 3CX runs on a Windows XP Professional system, and that can also accept PPTP connections, and having the phone connect directly into the same machine that runs the VoIP software should make it much easier to avoid firewall and routing problems.
And, indeed it did; the only other thing that I needed to do was to disable the VPN service on the router, and add a rule allowing traffic to port 1723 to pass through to the Windows computer, for both TCP and UDP, as well as IP protocol 47, which is something called GRE, and essential for PPTP VPNs.
Given more time, I could probably have solved the issues with the Draytek VPN server, and maybe even made it all work with the standard Nokia VPN, but there are only so many new things I like to learn at the same time.
Call me
Once SymVPN is installed, it creates a new access point on the phone. I have a destination configured for my VoIP account which has the home WiFi network first, then the access point from SymVPN.
Within SymVPN, you can pick which access point is used to create the VPN connection; when I tell the phone to sign in to the 3CX system, if it can’t find my home WiFi, it then uses SymVPN and connects that way. To all intents and purposes, it works exactly the same as when I’m at home, whether using another wireless network, or Orange’s data service.
So, I can dial a number on the E72 and press the right hand soft key (labelled ‘Net call’), to call using my home phone line. And calls that come in to my business number will ring on the mobile, wherever I am in the world.
If there’s free WiFi, then it costs me nothing more than it would cost to be using the phone at home – no incoming roaming bills, or international calls back home. People just dial my normal number to reach me.
Even if I can’t find free WiFi, I have an option on my mobile phone called Orange Travel Daily Data, which provides 50MB of data per day when abroad, for £8.50. Even a conservative estimate of how much data VoIP calling uses suggests that that 50MB limit is around 2 hours of calling – which would cost a lot more in roaming charges; the same price would get you around 45 minutes of incoming calls, or just 22 minutes of calls back to the UK.
Now that it all works, I’ll try to find time to do a step by step guide to setting some of this up.
post a comment | filed under Networking · VoIP | tags: 3cx, e72, nokia, telexy, VoIP, vpn
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