Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Connecting Two Asterisk Boxes Together via SIP

There may come a time when you have a pair of Asterisk boxes, and you’d like to pass calls between them. Luckily this isn’t very difficult, although it does have some oddities that we need to deal with, but from the configuration viewpoint it isn’t really all that difficult.

Configuring a Local Firewall

If you’re running iptables on the same machine as the Asterisk box, then you can run the following commands to open port 5060 for SIP signaling, and ports 10,000 through 20,000 for the RTP traffic. You can also narrow the range of RTP ports in the rtp.conf file located in /etc/asterisk. An excellent book on iptables firewalls is Linux Firewalls by Steve Suehring and Robert Ziegler (Novell Press):

# iptables -I RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -j ACCEPT
# iptables -I RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp --dport 10000:20000 -j ACCEPT
#service iptables save

Be aware that this will allow all UDP traffic from any source access to ports 5060 and 10,000 through 20,000.

Our topology will consist of a SIP phone (Alice) registered to Asterisk A (Toronto), and a separate SIP phone (Bob) registered to Asterisk B (Osaka). At the end of this section, you will be able to set up a call from Alice to Bob (and vice versa) through your pair of Asterisk boxes (see Figure 4-5). This is a common scenario when you have two physical locations, such as a company with multiple offices that wants a single logical extension topology.

Figure 4-5. SIP trunking topology

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