Lync Dial-In Conferencing Static Route Configuration

Something I haven’t seen documented with Lync Server 2010 so far is the dial-in conferencing configuration required to enable outbound dialing. This allows non-Enteprise Voice Lync, Lync Web App, or Lync Attendee users to join the conference by having the conferencing service call outbound to them as opposed to them manually dialing in to the conference and entering conference ID and passcodes.

In OCS 2007 R2 this was accomplished by adding a static route from the Front-End pool to a Mediation server for phone URI requests. The concept in Lync is the same, but there is a slight difference in ports used because the Mediation service in Lync now listens on Port 5070 for server-to-server traffic as opposed to 5061 in OCS 2007 R2. The route configuration also varies a bit. In the example below I have a Mediation server role collocated with my Front-End pool, fepool.confusedamused.com.

As Mike Stacy has already pointed out, the GUI for configuring static routes is now gone and must be done through the Lync Management Shell. To get started, we need to create the route statement and store it in a temporary variable. Replace the destination with your Mediation server pool FQDN and the matching URI with your own SIP domain:

$route = New-CsStaticRoute -Destination "fepool.ptown.local" -Port 5070 -MatchUri "confusedamused.com" -MatchOnlyPhoneUri $true -TLSRoute -UseDefaultCertificate $true -ReplaceHostInRequestUri $true

Then, we can assign the route to the global configuration:

Set-CsStaticRoutingConfiguration Global -Route @{Add=$route}

You should see the Front-End pick up this change within 5 minutes (another nice change over OCS 2007 R2) with an event log entry:

The observant folks here who have configured this in OCS 2007 R2 might have noticed the Replace host in request URI option wasn’t necessary back then. What I’ve found is that not selecting this option in Lync causes the calls to fail for non-Enterprise voice users. The SIP invite that gets sent to a Mediation server will typically look like this for an outbound call when the Replace host in request URI option is not selected:

INVITE sip:+12223334444@confusedamused.com;user=phone SIP/2.0
FROM: <sip:eddie@confusedamused.com;gruu;opaque=app:conf:audio-video:id:GJ5CPPSK>;epid=C68D6F45DA;tag=7ee8ecfbea
TO: <sip:+12223334444@confusedamused.com;user=phone>

This request will actually fail and you’ll see a SIP 488 Not acceptable here error message, followed by a SIP 503 Service unavailable error on the Mediation server. If you look at the trace you’ll find the following detailed error:

ms-diagnostics-public: 10025;reason=”Gateway peer in outbound call is not found in topology document”;component=”MediationServer”

What this boils down to is the call won’t route because the host the INVITE is addressed to (@confusedamused.com) isn’t actually part of the topology. If the Replace host in request URI option is selected, the SIP INVITE sent to the Mediation server replaces the @confusedamused.com with the actual destination in our route, @fepool.ptown.local, as seen below. Notice the difference in the first line, where the Mediation pool name has now replaced the previous host of just confusedamused.com. This call will be successful:

INVITE sip:+12223334444@fepool.ptown.local;user=phone SIP/2.0
FROM: <sip:eddie@confusedamused.com;gruu;opaque=app:conf:audio-video:id:F0GS16HB>;epid=BFDBD3B7B8;tag=42bd8c5b8
TO: <sip:+12223334444@confusedamused.com;user=phone>

I’ll throw out a disclaimer that the officially documented process may be different and that I may have to update this later, but I wanted to at least share what I’ve got working so far.