[Linphone-users] Another running instance of linphone has been detected

[David P. Caldwell]

I'm running the FreeBSD port of Linphone, currently at version 3.2.1,
which is apparently not the latest version, so it's possible something
has changed. But on my version ...

When attempting to run, I kept receiving the error message "Another
running instance of linphone has been detected" and something about
how the other instance would be awoken. But nothing happened.

I searched everywhere for this instance. I tried ps, and killall. I
tried looking for a .pid file. I tried looking through the source code
(I'm not much of a C hacker, but I found my way to the correct
function and saw a bunch of stuff about sockets).

Eventually I figured out that the problem was that another SIP client
on my machine had opened UDP port 5060 and was hence blocking Linphone
from opening it. (Jitsi, which I use as an IM client, had a bare SIP
account configured in it, causing it to do this; worse, since I was
using it for IM, I had configured to autostart so was pretty much
always open.)

So this error message should be rewritten, I would say. I would have
had a better chance with "Could not open UDP port 5060: is another
instance of Linphone running?" That would have helped me track it
down. Obviously the best error message for me would have been
something like "Could not open UDP port 5060: is another SIP client
running?" or something like that but this may not be as end-user
friendly (I don't know much about the Linphone user base; I'm new
here).

-- David Caldwell
http://www.davidpcaldwell.com/