Yeah accessing the router through SSH than gaining access to a shell is fairly easy on the Vodafone variant I have. I can even su. Used it to try and backup everything (using cp) before I started fooling around a few days ago. May be should tried dd but wasn't that desperate. Can't try anything on the VoIP side until get VDSL2 which is supposed to be today, but it's getting fairly late :-( Didn't have a look much on that, decided there's no point until I see what's going on with VDSL2.
BTW as a word of warning, perhaps not surprising but the SSH and web interface admin passwords are seperate. Even i you change the web interface password, it'll still be the default one for SSH.
From what I have been able to find out, VoIP should not be blocked on the modem. Have tried a couple of times, but still no joy on VDSL. Have been able to do a wireshark trace and packets go out to 2talk but nothing comes back.
I would raise a ticket with 2talk support. Perhaps if you can give them details of what is going out to their servers they may be able to check and see if they see any activity at their end?
If you have the ability to test via the WAN interface it would be interesting to compare the packets that are going out when connected via WAN (when VOIP works) with those via DSL (when VOIP doesn't work).
I have a ticket open with vodafone right now, working on a plethora of issues with this device. The VoIP problem being just one of them.
Unfortunately this was the first issue to be quickly dismissed with the generic response of "we don't offer VoIP to customers over VDSL, that is how we purchased this device". It was said in a way almost implying that it was a hardware limitation. This seems unlikely to me given that SIP is a software layer. A friend did point out to me that it could be that they didn't pay for a license to use SIP on the VDSL interface? I'm not sure. All I know is that all the options are there for it to work, even choosing VOICE on the interface, it just doesn't work.
I'm going to try get a better answer for this and the other issues I'm having with this router. Pretty frustrating really...
Vodafone issues may be different to Spark issues, I recall that VF deliberately lock down their gateway.
Also, my device is a HG659b (Spark branded), not the Huawei branded HG659, though there may be a common issue between them as software is probably 95% the same.
That's what I thought until I found the exact same issues on both models and firmwares. I haven't tested the HG659b like you, but I agree there probably isn't toooo much difference.
My other issues include poor WiFi performance and unreliable DHCP.
So far haven't had wifi or DHCP problems here, but not particularly demanding.
I've done some degree of testing, but limited by what I can do due to knowledge and modem limitations. IMO a useful step is would be if someone solders something to the JTAG or serial on the modem which I'm sure must exist so they can hopefully get better logging. This will of course void any warranty etc.
The suggestion the packets are leaving the WAN even on VDSL is interesting. One thing I wondered is if somehow the Vlan tagging wasn't being done properly or was being broken. I know UFB uses Vlan too, but I wondered if there's something to do with how it's set up which meant it was fine on ethernet, but not on VDSL. I don't have any UFB set-ups to test (I have tested ethernet via 3G networks, also ethernet using an ADSL modem once, as well as ADSL on the Huawei of course).
Actually I'm a bit confused where the Netshark device is place, do you know if the packets are actually reaching the ISPs gateway? (I think they won't if Vlan is broken right?) Or are you saying they're actually reaching 2talk and 2talk is replying? (Has anyone tried with their own server so they can see precisely whats received and sent?) In any case, if the packets really are definitely leaving the WAN this cuts down on a bunch of possibilities I was considering.
If the packets really are reaching the target and it's reply correctly, this is even more interesting, the most likely possibility would seem to be either they aren't reaching the voiper client, or they are but it isn't interpreting them correctly.
P.S. Not surprised Vodafone was no help with the VoIP issue, they've consistently said it doesn't work, even implied you can't use some other provider on fibre (which as we all know isn't true if you use the Admin account).
1) While I'm pretty sure this is unrelated, there does seem to be what I can only assume is a bug with how the router handles the VoIP client. If you do a ps or top or whatever, you probably see a lot of "voiper start" processes running. I can't see any reason why it should do this and I did come across a report of an older Huawei router spawning lots of VoIP clients and causing problems due to running out of memory. I say this is unrelated because it also occurs on ADSL or on ethernet where SIP works. I also get a lot of dms although I'm not sure what that is.
2) I tried to test the voiper client, hoping to get more logging and also to change the config. But it seems you can't do this via SSH. Occasionally it will segfault, more commonly the modem will reset or something. Most of the useful config appears to be in /var/voice_cfg.ini but I couldn't find a way to update this and have your changes run. If you change the ini file, it doesn't seem to be reloaded, your changes don't have an effect. If you change the config via the webinterface, it will just regenerate the config file from scratch negating your changes. I was hoping to try binding it to a different interface (IfName) like nas_p1_2.10 (which appears to be part of the VDSL WAN, perhaps vlan) but no dice. I'm not sure it will help anyway. Pinging via the ppp257 interface seems to work fine, most others don't. I don't know enough about network topology on *nix but I guess this is normal.
3) I haven't been able to work out who made the client, whether it Huawei proprietary, someone else proprietary, derived from something asterisk or whatever.
4) I got various stuff like ifconfig, iptables, netstat from VDSL (no VoIP working), ADSL and ethernet over 3G (VoIP working for both) but couldn't see 444anything useful although I wasn't look that hard nor try to understand everything.
5) Perhaps not surprising, but you can connect another router with a WAN port to the LAN of the Huawei (when it's connected via VDSL), than connect the other router's LAN to the ethernet WAN of the Huawei. Disable voice on the VDSL, disable everything but voice on the ethernet. To try and avoid problems with double NAT, set the other router to DMZ everything to the Huawei WAN. This sorta works (tried both incoming and outgoing calls for about 1 minute) although it's a major kludge. I'm not suggesting it for anything but for fun and perhaps for testing. In particular, for reasons I couldn't figure out, it seems to have problems if I start the router and Huawei at the same time. (The Huawei ethernet WAN is always disconnected, even if I restarted the other router, assign IP on the Huawei etc. Doesn't work if I leave the router running and restart the Huawei either.) If I start the Huawei first, let it start up then start the router, it seems to be fine. Restarting just the router doesn't stop it working. I have no idea what's going on here, I think the interfaces are exposing different MAC address, but I would guess the Huawei has probably seen something it doesn't like and semi disabled the WAN port. While I don't think the other router is the primary problem, it is an ultra cheapy so may be a different one will stop the the Huawei getting confused or whatever.
6) If you're thinking of connecting the modem LAN to the modem ethernet WAN, well this isn't particularly surprising but it doesn't work even if you do what I suggested above for a router in between (voice only, disable NAPT etc). The Huawei sees the WAN getting a LAN IP & decides there's a problem and changes the LAN IP to a different range. VDSL internet will still work if you get a new IP in the right range, but the ethernet WAN has the wrong IP. I don't know if you can do some sort of static IP assignment in a different range and then fool around with the internal routing and IP tables to get it working somehow it will even more of an unreliable kludge than putting a hardware router in between.
Just FYI, my internal subnet is 10.20.30.0/24 router is 10.20.30.1. The web interface restricts you to a /24, hopefully with more investigation I can make it a /16.
Yeah sorry should have mentioned that again, it's a Vodafone HG-659. I'm not with Vodafone though, but BigPipe but with a dynamic IP not CGNAT.
IPtables below in a zip (since 6 files). As mentioned my *nix knowledge is fairly limited (not saying my Windows network knowledge is superb) so only limited idea of what I was doing so chose -nvL and got the mangle, nat and filter tables (others don't work). I also removed my port forwards an hide my LAN IP but as you may figure it's in 192.168.0.0/24 . And wasn't that consistent in when I did this but in the VDSL one SIP wasn't working as expected, in the ADSL one it was of course. Didn't think of doing this before I was moved to BigPipe so had to go to a friends house to get ADSL ones as seems you can't sync with ADSL if on VDSL Didn't bother to include ethernet. But if there something else you feel is useful and I can probably redo with get VDSL and ethernet over 3G (ADSL may be not so much).
Dunno if it's useful to see what process is binding to what, unfortunately couldn't work out a way to do this. netstat -p for example isn't supported. And there's no lsof. Could try getting a binary for the router but finding one that would work seems like it wouldn't be easy (and ignoring the memory problem, the router doesn't have gcc or anything like that so can't compile stuff).
BTW, here's a list of the Vodafone HG659 directory structure. As you may figure, it was done in Windows. The ls on the router, doesn't seem to support -R so instead I just did a Get-ChildIte min Powershell of everything I copied to a mounted pen drive. Could be stuff is missing but I think other than /proc and /mnt it's probably all there.
My iptables knowledge is basically zero, but one theory could be that there is a deliberate or accidental configuration in iptables that blocks some of the SIP traffic when connected via DSL and allows the same traffic when on WAN.
I have no idea what I'm looking for but will have a shot, someone with more iptables knowledge might be able to share their thoughts.
Just to confirm, do you have the same issue as me? I.e VOIP works on WAN, doesn't work via DSL? Or is your issue different? I'm not clear whether the issue in my OP is also relevant to The VF HG659 as well as the Spark 'b' model.
Yeah VoIP works over ethernet WAN port as well as ADSL, but doesn't work on VDSL no matter what I try (which includes enabling voice for VDSL). Same error "no answer from remote station received" every 15 minutes. This is only internal VoIP. Soft phone or whatever works fine over the router over VDSL. Only thing I haven't tried is ethernet WAN used for UFB. Ethernet WAN in my case has been 3G connection shared over ethernet or in one case ADSL modem. (Or also the convulated thing of using another router to share the LAN over the WAN for voice only.)
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