Re: VOIP and iptables dodgies :)

Hi coldflame,

cold flame wrote:
> Firstly, have any of you had any experience with VOIP. i know that
> tpg have just started offereing it in combination with their
> broadband plans etc. Just wondering what some (real peoples)
> experiences are. quality? value? etc. any ideas.

I wouldn't recommend TPG to my enemies, have you tried any other ISP?

There are plenty of VoIP products out in the market today.  It can work 
very, very well and there are even options for making free calls to 
Australian fixed phone services from time to time; but that can change any 
day.

Handsets, modems, IP Phones, lots to consider; for better quality, you want 
equipment that can do G729 codec, it is cheap on bandwidth and high on 
quality -- many non-commerical software phones don't do G729 - I use X-Ten 
Pro (eyeBeam) with a USB handset and that works quite well.

Not so long ago, voipbuster.com had free calls to Australian fixed phones --  
you had to download their software to get a username and password, but once 
you did that, you could actually use SIP based products.  Now 
voipcheap.co.uk which appears to be a 'sister' company of voipbuster.com is 
offering the free calls, but they don't have any SIP capability available at 
this time; so your only option is to use their own software phone.

Some good pay for providers are:
  http://www.engin.com.au
  http://www.voise.com.au
  http://www.siphone.com.au/

> Secondly, i'm a student at the university of melbourne. and to use
> their proxies, you have to set those manually (fair enough). i was
> wondering, is there a way to make the server (i assume using
> iptables) pretend it is the university server whilst i am at home? ie
> pretend to be proxy.university etc for internally generated packets?

You might be able to something simple here with just host file entries or if 
you run your own DNS, then entries in there.

Kind Regards

AndrewM

Andrew McGlashan
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