# ekiga



## Anonymous (Jun 5, 2009)

I am thinking to swithc from Skype to Ekiga. I did check FreeBSD ports and there is 2.0 version but on the Ekiga site is 3.2. I am asking because I am talking with Windows user and they have the last version of Ekiga and I don't know how will works "new' with "old" and I don't want to spent time for compiling the old version if I will have a problem.
Thanks.


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## Oko (Jun 6, 2009)

Ekiga is a client for SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) commonly used for VoIP. The protocol is described by RFC 3261

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3261

Ekiga is to my knowledge somewhat correct implementation of a SIP client. 
Ekiga versions on the another hand refer to idiotic GUI (which is changed from time to time) and user friendliness. By that they mean that you have to know less and less about topology of your network and firewall settings in order to configure Ekiga correctly. 

Actually, I have to be honest and say that most users use Ekiga in two different ways. First way is as a SIP client. The second is as a SIP client for Ekiga SIP proxy server. Namely users who do not have fixed IP address commonly use SIP proxy servers as an intermediate step to talk to other users. Normally if you had fixed IP I could just talk to you from my pjsua SIP client as 

m sip:your-ip-address

But your IP address is constantly (every couple days or weeks) changing which causes problems. One idiotic way to over come that is to assign
you an account on Ekiga server which has a fixed IP address. Your Ekiga program then acts as a client for SIP protocol but also as a client for Ekiga server. You can think of Ekiga server as a Phone Central which relays the phone conversations and help people find each other. Instead of
trying to locate your computer our conversation is relayed on Ekiga server which both yours and my computer can locate easily.


Skype does the same thing except that uses its own proprietary protocol instead of SIP protocol. In both cases your phone calls get recorded by Skype or Ekiga server and they are sold to various Intelligence organizations like CIA for instance who are paying for your "free phone calls".

A very popular SIP server until recently was Free World Dialup which is not free any more. You can Google for the list of free sip proxy server which is very small and changes often.

I am not sure that Ekiga proxy server is 100% implementation of SIP proxy server as I have not being able to use it with other SIP clients.
My favorite as I said earlier is PJSUA but you can find half a dozen of other SIP clients among FreeBSD ports.

The better way to talk to people is that you actually get fixed IP address or in the worst case scenario DyDNS account which will enable anybody on the internet to find you using just a regular DNS server and your domain name. In that case you can completely avoid using SIP proxy servers.Even further you do not even have to use SIP protocol. You can use just OpenSSH and audio server on your FreeBSD machine as described in this cool post on misc@openbsd



> With the recent work done to the audio system on OpenBSD, a buddy of
> mine and I figured it should be easy to setup two-way voice-chat
> between two OpenBSD clients using nothing more than aucat(1) and
> ssh(1).  As we found out, it is both very easy and very usable!  We
> ...



Since I know that some of the people who talk to you are Windows users I would like to mention that all of above can be done on Cygwin i.e. on Windows.


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## Anonymous (Jun 6, 2009)

Oko said:
			
		

> Ekiga is a client for SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) commonly used for VoIP. The protocol is described by RFC 3261
> 
> 
> Since I know that some of the people who talk to you are Windows users I would like to mention that all of above can be done on Cygwin i.e. on Windows.



Oko, thank you very much.

Should be any problems if I use Ekiga version 2 and the Windows user version 3. I think about video. A windows user has a webcam. I remember that was problem (looong time ago).


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