Vonage and home LAN, anyone get them to work together?

I have Comcast broadband and already have it setup with my Fedora Core 5
computer. I connect the cable modem to eth0 and then eth1 goes to a
hub/switch where I plug in two XP computers. I am not good with iptables
so I used Firestarter to share the Internet with DHCP for the LAN.
Everything works great, I get high speed Internet on the linux box as
well as the two MS computers. I can share files and printers between them
with samba. Now bought Vonage...

I can connect the Vonage Linksys phone adapter to the cable modem
directly and it connects and works just fine. I reboot the phone adapter,
the power light flashes for a short period, I get an Ether net light and
a phone light, and it all works. If I do that, my home computers will not
have any Internet. What I want to do is to connect the Vonage phone
adapter to the hub so it can do it's thing from there. It does not work.
The power light flashes forever so it does not connect. When disable DHCP
on the phone adapter and give it a static IP address 192.168.0.1, (I do
this with my own MS computer, my GF leaves hers on DHCP.), tell it the
gateway 192.168.0.1, give it a net mask or allow it to find it's own
255.255.255.0, and try it that way, power light flashes forever, the
phone adapter does not work because it cannot connect. Grrrrrrr....

I tried to put another hub at the modem, one Ether net cable to the phone
adapter and one to the linux gateway, it does not work. If I reboot the
cable modem and plug in the phone first, it connects right away
(Apparently it used DHCP to pull an IP address and it's required info.)
and works. Then I plug in the home network but it cannot find anything on
the net. Apparently it cannot pull info with DHCP because maybe the phone
got it first, I think.

There has to be a way to make this work, I need my home LAN on the net
and of course I need the phone. How can I get the Linksys phone adapter
to connect as well as the linux box to Comcast so that they will both
work? I am pulling my hair out over this one and my GF is getting pissed
because I keep taking the computers off the net to experiment.

The phone can default to DHCP or you can specify an IP address, net mask,
and gateway. The Linksys phone adapter book says that you can forward
ports on the router (That would be my Fedora box.) to the following:

UDP 5060-5061 forward
UDP 53 forward
UDP 69 forward
UDP 10000-20000 forward

I use Firestarter and do not see an option to forward UDP but I think
that just forwarding the ports should work as I do Emule this way. Still,
this does not work either.

What can I do and how can I get the Vonage phone online as well as my
linux router/gateway/firewall? They just don't seem to play nice with
each other, it is either one or the other but not both. How come? There
has to be a way. Has anyone else gotten this to work and how did you do
it?

Thanks.

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theohmster at comcast dot net
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Ohmster <notareal@emailaddress.> writes:
(snip)
> What can I do and how can I get the Vonage phone online as well as my
> linux router/gateway/firewall? They just don't seem to play nice with
> each other, it is either one or the other but not both. How come? There
> has to be a way. Has anyone else gotten this to work and how did you do
> it?

I used to have Vonage with a Road Runner cable modem and back then the
VoIP worked just fine sat behind my Linux box that provided DHCP and NAT
for it. Lingo and BroadVoice have also worked fine with this type of
arrangement. (Now I have an irrelevantly-weird ISP, but still.)

What network traffic do you see on your home Linux gateway when you
watch with tcpdump or wireshark or whatever? Can you look for the Vonage
box getting its DHCP IP address, can you see its attempt at an outbound
connection, both reaching the gateway from the LAN, and being passed
onto the WAN by the gateway? The problem, or at least where it is, might
become clear if you watch what's happening.

(Note that IME normal netstat doesn't report things NAT'ed through the
machine, but http://tweegy.demon.nl/projects/netstat-nat/ can do it.)

HTH,

Mark.

--
Functional programming vacancy at http://www.aetion.com/

(E-Mail Removed) (Mark T.B. Carroll) wrote in
news:(E-Mail Removed):

> I used to have Vonage with a Road Runner cable modem and back then the
> VoIP worked just fine sat behind my Linux box that provided DHCP and NAT
> for it. Lingo and BroadVoice have also worked fine with this type of
> arrangement. (Now I have an irrelevantly-weird ISP, but still.)

Yes, that is what I wanted to do too.

> What network traffic do you see on your home Linux gateway when you
> watch with tcpdump or wireshark or whatever? Can you look for the Vonage
> box getting its DHCP IP address, can you see its attempt at an outbound
> connection, both reaching the gateway from the LAN, and being passed
> onto the WAN by the gateway? The problem, or at least where it is, might
> become clear if you watch what's happening.

Too late. As much as I want to make this work with my linux box providing
the NATs, I really need the phone, like NOW, so I took the Linksys PAP2
back and exchanged it for a Linksys WRT54GP2. It has a router in it. I plug
the Linksys into the cable modem, the telephones into the Linksys, and the
three computers into the Linksys, and it all works.

This looks like a pretty good router so I will stick the Linux box into the
DMZ so that the servers will work again. It does work with DynDNS but I use
Zoneedit and so I will just go back to the old way with scripts in my dchp
exit hooks file.

> (Note that IME normal netstat doesn't report things NAT'ed through the
> machine, but http://tweegy.demon.nl/projects/netstat-nat/ can do it.)
>
> HTH,
>
> Mark.

I really, really wanted to make it work but the PAP2 was having none of it.
Perhaps a different adapter would have accepted my Linux router, all the
computers do, but not that PAP2.

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