Enable Packets Pass-Through For Port Mirroring Traffic

Please note: this is legacy documentation. Please check out https://docs.miarec.com/all/ for the most up-to-date documentation and user guides. 

Important! This step is required only when passive recording is used (port mirroring).

MiaRec leverages the port mirroring function on the switch. Some firewalls may block the network packets, which are mirrored to the MiaRec server because they think that such traffic is malicious as it is not originally destined to that server (this is traffic from IP Phone to IP PBX rather than to the MiaRec server). This may cause one of the following issues:

  • one-way audio (when only one side of the conversation is recorded)
  • no audio is recorded at all (both sides of the conversation are not recorded).

Windows Firewall (included in Windows XP, Vista, 7, 2003, 2008) doesn't have such a problem. It passes through the mirrored network traffic to the MiaRec server. Other firewalls may block such traffic. Some of them have a configuration option, which allows to pass-through the traffic. Usually, such an option has to have the name "Allow network bridged connections" or "Allow Internet sharing". In the worse case, the firewall doesn't have an option for passing through the network traffic and the only possible solution is to disable the firewall at all (or replace that firewall with another model). Usually, such firewalls are built-in into antivirus packages.

Step-by-step guides for some known firewalls: