My company recently purchased a Video Conferencing solution from Polycom, the VSX 7000 camera. After getting it all connected and configured, I made a video conference call to the Polycom help desk to test it out.
The connection was successful, and the person at the help desk could see me, but I couldn't see them. I was told this was a port forwarding problem and that I would need to change some settings on our firewall, a Watchguard Firebox 500. I was given the necessary ports needed to open it up and went through and manually added a custom service that allowed forwarding to the proper internal address and tried to make the call again. Still no video from the help desk.
I then tried to enable 1-to-1 NAT by purchasing a second static IP and enabling the Any service to allow ALL traffic to be forwarded to and from the internal address. When I did that, I couldn't even connect the call to the helpdesk. I also tried enabling the NAT/Firewall transversal option on the VSX 7000, but still nothing. I've tried it in every conceivable configuration I could think of, but the best I can manage is the one-way link with my firebox log spitting out errors on protocol unknown ?.
After talking with the Polycom rep for a little while, he made me check that the Firebox was compatible with the H323 protocol, which the manual said it was-in dynamic NAT mode only. He suggested I call watchguard, which I did, only to find out that my predescessor had allowed our license with watchguard support to expire! This would cost us a little over $700 to renew for a year, including the penalty fee for not renewing during our original license. Since we're a nonprofit organization in a rather tight financial spot at the moment (we got the polycom setup to cut down on travel costs with our HQ), this isn't my best option.
I voiced my concerns to the technical support member at Watchguard that even if I renewed the subscription to their support service, is there any guarantee that our firebox would be compatible with the polycom system? He said he couldn't guarantee it, but he knows that it should work as they have instructions for it (but can't send me them or give me hints since I'm out of contract).
We will probably renew our subscription when things become more financially stable as the firebox itself is close to three times the cost, but we really need to get this up and going as soon as possible and I'd really like to know that it can be done with our current setup before we move forward.
So I'd like to ask if anyone has any ideas on how to make this work, or has any experience with these systems, I would GREATLY appreciate any help you could give. I'm assigning this 500 points, as we are quite desperate now. Thanks!
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