Making calls through Clearwater

These instructions will take you through the process of making a call on a Clearwater deployment.

Prerequisites

  • You’ve installed Clearwater
  • You have access to two SIP clients.
  • If you have installed Clearwater on VirtualBox using the All-In-One image you must use Zoiper as one of your clients. For the other client (or for other install modes) you may use any standard SIP client, we’ve tested with the following:
  • You have access to a web-browser. We’ve tested with:
  • Google Chrome

Work out your base domain

If you installed Clearwater manually, your base DNS name will simply be <zone>. If you installed using the automated install process, your base DNS name will be <name>.<zone>. If you installed an All-in-One node, your base name will be example.com.

For the rest of these instructions, the base DNS name will be referred to as <domain>.

Work out your All-in-One node’s identity

This step is only required if you installed an All-in-One node, either from an AMI or an OVF. If you installed manually or using the automated install process, just move on to the next step.

If you installed an All-in-One node from an Amazon AMI, you need the public DNS name that EC2 has assigned to your node. This will look something like ec2-12-34-56-78.compute-1.amazonaws.com and can be found on the EC2 Dashboard on the “instances” panel.

If you installed an All-in-One node from an OVF image in VMPlayer or VMWare, you need the IP address that was assigned to the node via DHCP. You can find this out by logging into the node’s console and typing hostname -I.

If you installed an All-in-One node from an OVF in VirtualBox, you simply need localhost.

For the rest of these instructions, the All-in-One node’s identity will be referred to as <aio-identity>.

Work out your Ellis URL

If you installed Clearwater manually or using the automated install process, your Ellis URL will simply be http://ellis.<domain>. If you installed an All-in-One node, your Ellis URL will be http://<aio-identity>.

Create a number for your client

In your browser, navigate to the Ellis URL you worked out above.

Sign up as a new user, using the signup code you set as signup_key when configuring your deployment.

Ellis will automatically allocate you a new number and display its password to you. Remember this password as it will only be displayed once. From now on, we will use <username> to refer to the SIP username (e.g. 6505551234) and <password> to refer to the password.

Configure your client

Client configuration methods vary by client, but the following information should be sufficient to allow your client to register with Clearwater.

  • SIP Username: <username>
  • SIP Password: <password>
  • SIP Domain: <domain>
  • Authorization Name: <username>@<domain>
  • Transport: TCP
  • STUN/TURN/ICE:
  • Enabled: true
  • Server: <domain> (or <aio-identity> on an All-in-One node)
  • Username: <username>@<domain>
  • Password: <password>
  • Use rport: true (this is required if your SIP client is behind a NAT when contacting your deployment).

Extra configuration to use an All-in-One node

If you are using an All-in-One node, you will also need to configure the following at your client.

  • Outbound Proxy
  • Outbound Proxy address: <aio-identity>
  • Port: 5060 (or 8060 if installed in VirtualBox)
  • DNS record for <aio-identity>

Once these settings have been applied, your client will register with Clearwater. Note that X-Lite may need to be restarted before it will set up a STUN connection.

Configure a second number and client

Create a new number in Ellis, either by creating a new Ellis user, or by clicking the Add Number button in the Ellis UI to add one for the existing user.

Configure a second SIP client with the new number’s credentials as above.

Make the call

From one client (Zoiper if running an All-in-One node in VirtualBox), dial the <username> of the other client to make the call. Answer the call and check you have two-way media.

Next steps

Now that you’ve got a basic call working, check that all the features of your deployment are working by running the live tests or explore Clearwater to see what else Clearwater offers.