CUPS 8.6 and CUPC - External Access without VPN

[muranskycotech]

Greetings!

I'm running CUCM 7.1.5 with CUPS 8.6.1 and CUPC 8.5.4. I'm curious if it's possible to safely allow users outside my network (let's say they took their computer home for the evening) access to CUPC for IM only... I don't care as much about softphone use or desk phone control, although cool if I can allow softphone access, I guess.

Thanks,

Aaron

[Tommer Catlin]

You could, but you would letting out your SIP information to the public internet.  You would need to open a pin hole for 5060 or 5061 and allow that traffic to go through your firewall.   CUPS is not a fan of firewall SIP inspection also.  You may find presence bubbles on/off or go gray.     I dont have a timeline, but we know that the Jabber cleint will have the lightweight anyclient built into which will automatically build a vpn tunnel in the background back to Corp.  This will then turn your IM client into a seemless client.   Right now, the end user would have to launch VPN, then IM/softphone would work.  With the next version, it will automatically work for them.  Similar to what you see on the iphone/ipad and soon android.

As for now... stick with SSL vpn client or something back to corp.  You may also try some sort of XMPP gateway in your DMZ. I have not tried it, but may work.