[TriLUG] DirecPC and VoIP (Kinda OT)

[Tarus Balog]

On Aug 3, 2004, at 11:04 AM, Aaron Caudle wrote:

> Background:
> I installed a VoIP phone down in Haiti last October and was  
> successfull in getting it running.  It connects back to a gateway in  
> Asheville at the company I work for.  Its connected by a Huges  
> Satellite connection (DirecPC).  The satellite has a built in gateway  
> that does simple NAT, but is unable to do any port forwarding etc.   
> Soon after I left, they begin experiencing problems, starting with  
> only one way communications - they could hear, but we could not hear  
> them, to then being unable to connect at all.

I was a DirecPC sufferer for three years, so mebbe I can help.

What do you mean when you say "gateway"? I assume this is the later  
version of DirecPC (3.0 I think they called it). White dish versus  
gray, and two-way transmission versus satellite return.

When I used DirecPC, you had to have a Windows box running the DirecPC  
software. In other words, the satellite had coax that ran to the  
"modem", and the "modem" connected to the Windows box via USB.

Now - Windows "Internet connection sharing" and DirecPC seemed to work  
fine - for Windows systems. The moment you put a non-Windows box into  
the mix (I was running multiple Linux boxen, a Solaris box and a Mac)  
you could get some connectivity as long as it was short (a ping, a DNS  
lookup), but the moment you tried to download anything of size (and by  
"size" I mean 100K) it would stall and timeout.

I ended up buying Deerfield's windows gateway software that allowed me  
to proxy everything through the Windows box. That worked. But for the  
non-standard protocols (outside of FTP and HTTP for example) I had to  
set up a SOCKS proxy or else the connection would just stop working.  
PITA, but I had no other option.

So, let me know how you are connecting to the DirecPC network, and  
mebbe we can figure this out.

-T

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