Phone Manager and Secure Remote VPN Client

[ifconf]

I am connecting to my office network from home using Checkpoint Secure Remote Client, I have full access to my office network. When I attempt to connect Phone manager on my home PC to the IPOffice in the office, the program just sits at the connection details dialoge but never brings up the List of users to log in. On my firewall logs I can see the TFTP connection from my home network but I cannot see any response from the IPOffice. Any ideas????

 

[telesonic]

Simply put if you can ping it then phone manager will find it by putting the same IP address in the configure PBX dialog box. Check that you can ping and get a reply and recheck your ip address in the configure pbx dialog box.

I have found that the ip address field can take your typed info very very slowly - pause and then put a digit in the wrong place.

 

[ifconf]

That's the weird thing about this problem, I was not able to ping the IP address of the IPoffice. I can ping anything else in the Office network but not the IPOffice. Could not figure out why.

 

[telesonic]

Check you have an ip route in the ip office config that points traffic to your remote network via the correct router (As its gateway)

If not then the ipoffice may be receiving your ping but the reply is being sent somewhere else, probably over the internet...

 

[ifconf]

I see what you mean. I have only the route needed to connect to another site that I have which also has an IPOffice. Does that mean that for Remote users connecting with Secure Remote VPN client would I need to create a route with IP address 255.255.255.255 on MASK 255.255.255.255 going to the Gateway interface that the IPOffice connects to? Remote users would not always have a static IP address so I'm assuming that if the IPOffice cannot find a route for the traffic as one is not defined that it would then send to the gateway. Does that sound right?

 

[telesonic]

Put in a route for every remote office, so you might have routes such as these below...

192.168.0.0 subnet 255.255.255.0 with no gateway pointing to LAN (This covers the main office).
192.168.1.0 subnet 255.255.255.0 gateway address of the router which might be 192.168.0.1 pointing to LAN. (This puts in place routing to remote site A)
192.168.2.0 subnet 255.255.255.0 gateway address of relevant router - probably the same one unless you have multiple ADSL's etc; so 192.168.0.1 again and poining to LAN again.

Just repeat it for each remote site then you are covered for any data traffic the IPOffice needs to send to each remote site.

 

[ifconf]

The problem is these remote sites are my remote users using Phone Manager over their VPN client connections from home, I won't know what their IP addresses will be as they are dynamically assigned by their ISP. They will also be travelling around a lot using internet connections at customer sites, hotels etc.

 

[telesonic]

I think with softphone set ups you can treat them as a local ip address.
If the remote user firstly logs on to the internet by whatever means they have and then uses a vpn connection to your vpn server they will be assigned an ip address on your local network. This way you won't need an ip route in the config as you will be on the network as far as the ip office is concerned. So all you need to set up is a new user as a voip extension on the system andn the rest is on your laptop and vpn server.
I admit now though that this is slightly theory only from me though as I've never actually had to set up a softphone, but I did not want to give up at this stage!

 

[aramsay]

I would have to disagree with you "telesonic". On our VPN connection, which uses Cisco VPN, all VPN clients are assigned an IP address within a different IP from our internal range.

Eg.
Internal range is 126.0.0.0 subnet 255.0.0.0 (I know we should be using a private, but it's historic, and I've not got around to changing it yet).

VPN clients get assigned 172.31.3.1 subnet 255.255.255.0

Therefore on the IPO have a route as follows: IP Address = 172.31.3.0, IP Mask = 255.255.255.0, Gateway IP Address = 126.126.0.3 (our router/firewall), Desination = LAN1, Metric = 1

You could always leave IP Address and IP Mask empty, therefore creating a default route to the router / firewall.

Hope this helps

Alan

 

[ifconf]

Problem solved at last. I created a new IP route leaving the IP address and IP mask fields blank, I put in a gateway IP address using the IP address of the firewall interface to which the Office LAN is connected to and set Destination as LAN1. Tested from home last night and it worked fine. It seems that the IPO will not send traffic out of the LAN with out this "default" route.
Many thanks for all your help.

 

[gMan312]

First Post at tek-tips - just wanted to say THANK YOU very much - been fighting this problem for months, passing blame between firewall, router, and questionable P2P T1 connection... changing the routes to those specified by Servebase solved my problem.

Thanks.