GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 335088
ekiga listens on wrong network interface by default
Last modified: 2007-03-29 16:37:33 UTC
I installed ekiga 2.0.1, answered all the questions of the configuration druid, set up a PC-to-phone account, tried to call... in the statusbar was quickly displayed something like "server ... doesn't answer" then "Timeout". then the phone call failed. it took me a long time to find out that the reason was that my computer has two network cards (eth0 local network, eth1 internet, I do NAT on this computer), and that ekiga was listening on eth0 (the wrong one). going in edit->preferences->protocols->network settings->network interface, I changed "listen on" from eth0 to eth1 and now it works. i think that if there are several network interfaces in the computer, and if ekiga cannot detect the right one to listen on by default, the user should be asked in the initial configuration druid which one is "connected on the internet", that would prevent this problem. also maybe ontop of this, when there are several network interfaces, the timeout message could be changed to indicate that listening on the wrong network interface could be the source of the problem.
For listening, it should listen on all interfaces, and detect if new ones are added, unless the user explicitly want to force ekiga to listen on a single interface. For calling it should use by default the one used to register to ekiga.net (or the account provider). Again when registering, unless the user explicitly defines an interface, ekiga should cycle through all the avilable network interfaces. With laptops it is expecially important to cycle through available interfaces as laptop users may switch interfaces wireless <-> wired during usage or after suspend/resume etc.. It is also important for uses were you must set up VPNs to reach other networks, and you may have to use VPNs on remote sites while no problem exist in main campuses. VPNs may use interfaces like tun0, tun1 etc... The same is for dialup (ADSL) connected computers, where you may want to start the line later. If a registration fails, ekiga should try again after a user adjustable amount of time, and cycle through all interfaces (again unless the user wants to force use of only one specific interface).
In fact, we indeed already have some bug reports about ekiga not being able to cope well with multiple and/or dynamic network interfaces. I'm trying to melt them into one. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 324564 ***