QVOIP Floating Rule 2.3.2
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I have a question with regard to the general behavior of the Traffic Shaping wizard under PFSense 2.3.2.
I am running several (5) Cisco SIP phones through Vonage Business, using a Charter Business modem/router, 7up / 100dn Mbps. Simple dedicated WAN/LAN port PFSense 2.3.2 setup.
I run the wizard for the 'Dedicated Links', and select VOIP during the wizard, indicating that I want to prioritize for Vonage, and I want a dedicated 1Mbps real-time bandwidth. I go through the rest of the wizard, selecting various things, etc. etc. After I finish the wizard, and the queues are created and loaded, I go to the queue status viewer and I see qVoip (and all other queues), and I can also see all the correct queues 'By Interface' under Traffic Shaper from the Firewall drop-down menu.
However, I see no rules pertaining to VOIP under Floating Rules. Sometimes I see traffic in the qVoip queue, other times I do not. I have replicated this behavior on multiple routers.
My question is, is this the expected behavior of the Traffic Shaper wizard with regard to floating rule creation using HFSC? How does the shaper know what to do with VOIP if there is no rule catching it? I thought qDefault was the catch all for anything not explicitly specified, so what am I missing here?
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The entire point of the TS wizard is to create the queues and then populate the firewall rules list with appropriate content. If there are no floating rules whatsoever then something has gone very wrong. If I were you, I would blow it all away and try again. For VoIP, it normally creates two floating rules that prioritize everything that comes or goes to your VoIP provider's IP address or specified port/range.
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The floating rules have all been created for all levels except for 7- ie. VOIP. That is what I thought was odd. Everything except VOIP is created. I have run the wizard upwards of 20 times on 3 different routers, trying both Vonage and Generic VOIP, and have experienced the same thing. Is anyone else having a different experience with the wizard for Dedicated Links using HFSC?
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Show your rules.
You said sometimes traffic shows up in qVOIP, which means something is assigning traffic to the queue.
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That's what is really strange. Yesterday, I'm showing traffic in the queue, this morning I look at it and there is nothing. Nothing changed whatsoever. It was bizarre. I can only assume that what I was seeing yesterday may not have been actual VOIP traffic in the queue?
I have included the Floating Rules that the shaper wizard created- I have not modified any floating rules manually at all.
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Here are the Queues and the status queues.
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I think maybe your eye tricked you. There is no VoIP rule as you said, and there is no traffic in that queue. On the TS wizard's VoIP page, what do you select for every option?
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Right, as I said, there is no VOIP rule, and there is definitely no traffic in that status queue at this point. There had been the previous day, but I restarted the router when I saw no traffic was going to the queue yesterday morning like there was previously- hence the 0 value in the status queue. The day before, it varied from 3-300Kbps. Since then, it does nothing. I gather, that is as suspected based on what you have said.
As far as going through the wizard, here is a screen shot of what I select while going through the wizard, using both Vonage and Generic, respectively. Neither ends up generating any rules. Is there something that is obvious that I am just missing?
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You're not providing the IP address of your upstream VoIP server. Your VoIP phones connect to your VoIP provider at a specified IP address of theirs. You need to figure out what that is (just check the state table and look at which IP address your phones are talking to) and then specify it when running the wizard. That's likely why the rules weren't created. However, the GUI should have hassled you for not providing a SIP server/upstream address.
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First of all, thank you for taking the time to help me with this, I REALLY appreciate it!
Second of all, that fixed it. I pulled the registration server (sip-XXXXXX.accounts.vocalocity.com, where XXXXXX= my account number) from one of the phone's config, created an alias for it (since I have no idea if the IP address changes or if it's load balanced, etc), assigned it and it worked. It created the rule based on the host name.
Here's what I don't understand. The wizard clearly states that it's optional (check the pic) and none of the other rules require a host. Why is VOIP different? Is this a bug in the wizard, or is the text about it being optional erroneous?
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since I have no idea if the IP address changes or if it's load balanced, etc
Ask your VoIP provider. It's not a secret so they should have no trouble telling you the exact IP addresses or ranges they use. Make an alias and then use the alias as your SIP server.
Why is VOIP different?
Those other options link to rules involving a specific port used by those particular devices. With a generic provider, you must specify the IP address. If you know that all your phone traffic uses port 5060 for instance, then you could craft floating rules that trigger on that port instead of needing to use a source/destination IP address.
