I hadn’t heard anything from AT&T about getting the VoIP telephony working on my IP Flex circuit. I shot them an email and we set up a conference call for this morning to attempt to turn up the VoIP circuits. The tech did some magic, and outbound calls were suddenly working. However, incoming calls, which had worked, were broken. It looked like it could be a firewall issue, so we took down the conference call so we could work on the firewall without bothering the tech.
After a minute or so, we noticed that all the LAN-connected web browsers had stopped working. At first, I thought it was something that I’d done to the firewall. Since Lamb, the sacrificial computer, was still sitting on the WAN side of the firewall, I programmed its IP address to x.x.202.195 and pinged 8.8.8.8. It worked. Web browsing did, too. Things were looking bad for the firewall. Before I rolled up my sleeves and undid all the recent firewall changes I could think of, I decided to run a little test. I unplugged the WAN firewall port, and I set Lamb’s IP address to x.x.202.194, which was the firewall’s IP address. Now Lamb couldn’t ping 8.8.8.8. It looked like, when the tech configured the router for VoIP, she did something that kept non-SIP traffic from x.x.202.194 from going where it was supposed to go. We knew that SIP traffic from x.x.202.194 was working, since we could make outgoing telephone calls.
I put in a call to tech support. Over the next several hours, I got escalated through techs, every one of whom had trouble believing my description of the symptoms — “Could you have made a clerical error?” I thought I’d done a pretty good job of nailing down the problem, but that didn’t seem to cut any ice. We are still escalating, but seven hours into the Internet outage, it doesn’t look like we’re making any progress.
Finally, I decided on a workaround. I set the firewall’s WAN IP address to x.x.202.195, and Lamb’s to x.x.202.196 (just to avoid a conflict). Now Internet data works fine. Of course, I broke VoIP with that change, but I can live with that until AT&T can get at the root problem.
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