AsterBlog – VoIP, Asterisk and Networking Discussion

As alluded to by Niall I have been testing Marc Blanchet’s port of Asterisk to IPv6. Apart from a minor error ( minor code wise, but it had the implication of rejecting all incoming SIP registrations! ), it works quite well. It peers with an IPv4 Asterisk server just fine.

Much more difficult was the location of a suitable client to test it with. Read Niall’s entry to find out more about Counterpath’s “offering”, but I found an Asian client that worked quite well, “Spiderphone“. I tried a windows port of “Linphone”, but it failed to register properly. It must be noted that the windows port is behind the Linux version, so it possibly works much better there. Other Linux based phones such as “Kphone” also claimed IPv6 support but I could find any windows version of them.

A significant portion of Asterisk’s code SIP base is dedicated to overcoming the problems of SIP with NAT, I would estimate. This kind of problem would disappear with IPv6. But right now there is kind of a chicken and egg situation regarding VoIPv6, there is little in the way of an IPv6 SIP infrastructure and few clients. Hopefully when IPv6 support gets enabled in Asterisk’s trunk code base half that problem will no longer apply and more client programs will be moved to IPv6.