I think one of the most difficult ideas to grasp when someone migrates to FS from other soft-switches is the definition of endpoints (in the generic meaning of the word) i.e. other gateways that your FS gateway will exchange traffic with. From what I understood from the wiki : a user (directory) is an entitiy that defines our subscribers (with registration or not) a gateway is another VoIP gateway that we use to send traffic to (provider) and sometimes receive traffic from (correct me If I am wrong this far) Now, I have the following scenario : I have an FS box that will exhchange traffic with certain gateways. Sometimes a gateway will act as a client (customer) or a provider, depending on the traffic direction. 1st approach : The first plan I tried, was to use the directory to "define" these other gateways since they are clients. I turned off registrations in my SIP profile (because I don't need any), I wrote an xml file for each gateway in the directory with the appropriate cidr and that was it. I then realized that I could not use my definitions in the users directory so that I can send a call to that client. In order to do so, I had to define that particular IP as a gateway in my SIP profile <gateways> section. 2nd approach : I forgot all about the directory thing (after all I needed not any mailboxes or registrations) and tried to implement the same scenario by just using gateways. I declared the gateways in my SIP profile and was able to dial out to them just by using : <action application="bridge" data="sofia/gateway/<gw_name>/$1"/> which was fine. But when I got an inbound call from that gateway I realized (1) that I had to define this gateway in an acl and (2) the dialplan used (context) was always the inbound one since there is no way of telling a gateway which context to use when accepting a call. I found a way in the wiki that suggests using DIDs to accomplish that, but I find it this to be not a very elegant solution because I don't want to use prefixes or DIDs to accomplish my goal. I want to be able to define a gateway using a gateway name (label) of my choice and an IP address, so when I come to the point of having 100+ gateways i won't have to search wich DID to use for a new one. 3rd approach : Use a combination of the above. Declare a gateway that receives and sends traffic twice. Once as a user in the directory and once in the gateways section of my profile. Does all these sound correct to you? Am I missing something? Which approach is the best? Please send me your feedback. Inline comments would be ideal. -- ------------------------------------------- Apostolos Pantsiopoulos Kinetix Tele.com R & D email: regs@kinetix.gr -------------------------------------------