At work I've been pushing my boss to use Asterisk for our phone system. It's a voice over IP (VoIP) based PBX for Linux and boy is it awesome. Over the last few weeks he's started to succumb to my threats and I've got a basic system up and running. Tonight I set up a peering arrangement with a friend of mine.

Asterisk uses a custom protocol named IAX2 (pronounced eeks) to talk amongst itself. The configuration lies in iax.conf

[peering]
port=5036
type=friend
peercontext=incoming
context=incoming
auth=md5
secret=password
host=other.host.name

The problem we fought for so long was in this little stanza. We didn't realize that the iax contexts had to be named the same. In my example I've used peering. In real life we used each other's names thinking that he would authenticate as him and me as, well, me. Not so apparently. We got this error instead:

chan_iax2.c:5402 socket_read: Rejected connect attempt from X.X.X.X

and

chan_iax2.c:5507 socket_read: Call rejected by Y.Y.Y.Y: No authority found

Just that simple change and everything was smooth sailing. I was sitting in monkey screeching heaven, if you know what I mean.