Soft Phone with one-way audio over VPN

[Pokertrio]

I have a checkpoint secure VPN with a remote user using the softphone. I am told that the VPN is not blocking any ports but I have one-way audio when using my softphone over the VPN. If I am in the office on the LAN it works fine so I know it has something to do with the VPN. Does anyone have any suggestions? I am pretty sure it is a blocked port but I am told the VPN is open and is not blocking ports.

[Tenny321]

check the audio setting and make sure you head set is on the correct device. If you are doing this to home i would us external assignment to your location instead. It is a lot more reliable.

[svatturi]

We are facing the same problem? Any pointers on the resolution?

[CReady]

Routing Porblem

The problem is more than likely a IP Routing issue. Think of it from this perspective...IF you are local to the ShoreWare server does your softphone work? What's different when you go to a remote office or location? The IP address of the subnet you are sitting on! The softphone from what I understand DOES NOT support Network Address Translation or NAT. This is important because the IP address you laptop is running, is actually different than what you use for your VPN connection. Therefore the ShoreWare server does NOT know of the IP subnet your laptop is sitting on and can not forward the data packets to your softphone. Hence one-way traffic.

I use the Ingate SIP Proxy because I have SIP trunks. I had this exact problem and have to enter a static route in for each remote user subnet. The problem is MOST Linksys, D-Link, etc router all use 192.168.1.x as the primary subnet upon boot up. I had to have each user change their local router LAN IP address to 10.x.y.z to keep things sane. Then I only had to have (1) static route pointing to the VPN gateway for all of the 10.x.y.z networks. Keep in mind that VoIP traffic is bi-directional and if you can not PING the device from where you are sitting, you more than likely will not be about to talk to it.

I use the softphone exclusively because I am a remote home office user. I also manage the phone system remotely which with the ShoreTel system is a breeze.

[svatturi]

Go this resolved on our end. Two of the Shoretel switches did not have their default gateway set! Wonder how/why this was missed during the install process.

Once fixed, the softphoine worked like a charm