Common coturn TURN Server Misconfigurations That Silently Break WebRTC Relays
Self-hosting a TURN server with coturn is a frequent last resort for WebRTC developers, but several common misconfigurations can cause silent failures that are difficult to diagnose. On Debian and Ubuntu systems, the coturn package ships with its enable switch commented out in /etc/default/coturn, meaning the service can appear active via systemctl while never actually binding to any port. Developers can verify whether coturn is truly running by checking bound ports with 'ss -lunp' rather than relying on service status alone. A separate issue arises when cloud VMs advertise private internal IP addresses as relayed candidates, causing ICE negotiation to stall even though allocations appear successful server-side. Before assuming coturn itself is broken, engineers should first confirm TURN is actually in the connection path using browser WebRTC diagnostic tools and rule out unroutable addresses or closed UDP port ranges, which produce identical symptoms and are far more common.
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