Help with Remote Phone

[SplendidCoffee]

I am trying to help a company who has been running 3CX for a couple of years. They are not currently on any maintenance plan and have hired me (an IT consultant) to help. They have a user who is working from home and is interested in being connected to 3CX however we have not found a way to accomplish this. Most of the tutorials that I have found are for when the 3CX server is behind a firewall, but in this case, it is not. It is fully accessible via the Internet. However, the end-user is behind a firewall and that's where the problem begins.

He'd like to use a regular desk phone to access his 3CX server. I've tried using the 3CX phone/assistant VPN option but couldn't really diagnose the issue that we had. Can anyone offer any advice as to how to accomplish this?

This company is not currently in any position to add 3CX support back to their account so your help is greatly appreciated. Also, they are running the 32 call Enterprise edition v9.

 

[sigma1]

Well... your issue is likely the firewall/router at the end user's home. Kindly provide router make and model as well as phone make and model.

 

[eagle2]

Hi,

this seems a little bit strange. Is the user at home able to ping or traceroute his 3CX server at all ? If not, you must check his home router, whether is blocking the IP address of the server. Otherwise the home address is blocked at server's side -- this must be the 3CX server itself, if there is no remote router firewall. Have you run the firewall checker on the 3CX server ?

If you are able to ping or traceroute the 3CX server address from user's home, try to log into the 3CX server from user's home and check the log. If you are able to do this, there is no reason why you can't register al least 3CX softphone to server (with or without using 3CX tunnel). Make sure this is working before trying registering 'desktop' phone. Meanwhile what you understand by 'desktop' phone, i.e. what brand it is, model, settings.

In general I would not recommend exposing 3CX server in Internet. The risk of being hacked is great, moreover you are not using version 10, which is better protected. There are lots of inexpensive routers on the market, like Linksys recommended by 3CX. I would recommend Mikrotik for more advanced applications (also capable to discover attacks and blacklist IPs). Port forwarding is simple and straight-forward process.

Regards.

 

[willow]

enabling stun on the remote phone and not blocking the needed ports should work just fine. you may need a route on the 3cx server to route that traffic for the IP out a certain interface. I have done this on avaya and other systems and have not had any issues.