Matt G. Watson

Synopsis

So you’ve setup a VoIP phone system, but now you want to setup QoS on your router to prioritize your VoIP packets. This is imperative if you intend on running VoIP over any kind of WAN links like I do. Call quality might suffer otherwise - especially when that staff member decides he wants to donwload that 300mb service pack at work instead of using his own connection at home. I’ll show you here how you can solve this problem by using QoS on your Vyatta router.

My network looks something like this:

As you can see, I have 5 independent sites, the left side being my datacenter, and the right being individual sites where are staff work out of. Each site on the right has a Vyatta VC4 router running as its gateway and each of these sites are running Aastra IP phones which connect to our Asterisk PBX server running in the data center.

Anyways… onto the nitty gritty. Click the article title or the read more link below to read on.

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Continueing on from where Part 2 left off, this post will be mostly filled with configuration information used throughout our infrastructure getting it getting for Asterisk.

I left off Part 2 talking about my TFTPd modification that allows me to execture arbitrary commands when a file is requested from my TFTPd server, to explain the rule mentioned in my previous post.

x ^00085D /usr/local/bin/mkaastracfg

the ‘x’ means this is an ‘execute rule’, this is what my patch added. the ‘^00085D’ is the pattern to match, the Aastra phones request a config file named <MAC>.cfg, that 00085D is the OUI prefix for the Aastra phones. Then as you can see it executes my mkaastracfg program, the filename being requested gets passed to mkaastra config as a command line argument, this is how the program collects all the configuration data. The only extra step here is configuring your DHCP server to set option ‘66′ (boot-server) to the IP address of your TFTPd server.  If you are using ISC DHCPd you just need to add the following line to your scope.

option tftp-server-name “10.1.0.10″;

This now essentially allowed us to create devices and assign default users to devices inside FreePBX, then plug a brand new right out of the box phone into one of our PoE ports the phone boots up our TFTPd dynamically creates its configuration file when it boots and thats it, the new is up and rocking, no additional configuration required. I also recommend dropping your firmware files on your TFTPd server as well, as your phones will automatically download updates when you place them there.

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