Hi Juha,
A quick check on ebay and google shows that the price is US$400-500 for a cisco 831 router. I understand that pix is an overkill and its fixup-sip is almost unusable due to several serious design flaws. But the capability of inbound traffic refreshing timer and adjustable udp traffic timeout value makes it a feasible option.
I am more looking at sub-$100 price range consumer router. With NAT ping, the only requirement is the support of inbound traffic refreshing the NAT binding timer and ideally a large timeout value.
If I go to the $200 range solution, there are a few options, e.g. a linksys RV042 router with open source code provided by linksys, or a Soekris box with open source m0n0wall firewall. The pro is the ability to adjust the timeout value for SIP (port 5060) traffic. The con is the time and effort of developing this solution and relative high cost compared with out of box solutions.
Thanks, Richard
-----Original Message----- From: Juha Heinanen [mailto:jh@tutpro.com] Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2004 8:26 PM To: Richard Cc: 'Jiri Kuthan'; 'Jesus Rodriguez'; serusers@lists.iptel.org Subject: RE: [Serusers] NAT ping and consumer router
any cisco ios router, e.g., low end dsl routers, have sip aware nat and you don't need any pinging. pix is cisco firewall and may be too expensive.
-- juha