sysadminman.net

Sysadminman is now offering UK based Virtual Private Servers running Trixbox and Elastix.

Please see here for details - http://sysadminman.net/uk-voip-vps.html

Sysadminman is now offering UK based Asterisk VPS servers that have Asterisk, FreePBX and A2Billing installed and ready to use. These VPSs are hosted in one of the premier datacentres in the UK (BlueSquare) and have low pings to UK and the rest of Europe.

Asterisk and FreePBX combined make an extremely flexible and easy to manage “virtual telephone system” and A2Billing is a billing application enabling you to charge for calls made using your system if required.

Some possible uses of an Asterisk VPS are -

• Small businesses wanting to manage a collection of SIP extensions
• Reselling calling cards or VOIP termination
• People who do a lot of traveling and want to stay in touch wherever they are
• Route calls based on time of day, DDI, CLID, etc…
• Provide contact telephone numbers in cities around the world all routed to your local phones over the internet
• Voicemail to E-mail

See here for more details and have you have any questions please get in touch

Matt

For a few months now I have been backing up my server using rsync to some space at fxhbackup which is part of fusionxhost.com. The backups worked well and I never really had any problems. There was an issue with the control panel showing my disk usage incorrectly but I opened a ticket and they didn’t seem too bothered - and I wasn’t either as long as my backups carried on working.

The only issue I really had with the service was trying to cancel it recently. I couldn’t find a link in my control panel, or on their website, to cancel the service so I opened a ticket asking them how to cancel my service. For 2 days nothing happened and then, with no communication, my access stopped working.

I have since e-mailed them asking if the would confirm that, in fact, my service has been terminated but no reply.

So, I can do nothing but cancel my PayPal subscription and assume that that’s the end of it.

A real shame of a way to end what was a reasonably pleasant experience.

I don’t think I’d go back to them. The service worked pretty well but I can do without the hassle of trying to chase them up over account queries.

So, fusionxhost, if you’re listening out there please let me know if my account has been canceled! 

Update: fusionxhost did contact me about a week later to apologize and confirm that my account had indeed been canceled. Who knows, maybe this post even helped 

So, would I recommend them? Maybe. The service was pretty good, I never had any problems with it.

I’ve started renting out some OpenVZ VPSs for a few people and wanted to make sure that they couldn’t be used to send spam. One of the easiest ways to do this is just to limit the number of outbound smtp connections allowed from the VPS using iptables.

I used the following iptables rules on the OpenVZ host node to accomplish this -

The ip address is the ip address of the VPS. The optional log rule in the middle (that’s commented out) is useful when you are setting this up so you can check that packets are actually begin affected by the rules.

I’ve been playing with OpenVPN for the past couple of weeks and I’m pretty impressed. OpenVPN allows you to create a private network between 2 computers. These could be 2 servers or a client and a server. A few of the reasons for wanting to do this are -

• bypassing your ISPs traffic shaping
• making your traffic appear to originate from a different country
• encrypting your laptop traffic over an insecure link - such as a coffee shop wifi connection
• anonymous web surfing
• bypassing a countries web access controls

Setup and configuration of the server component can be fairly complicated depending how you want to manage the certificates and networking on there. It’s possible to install it on Linux or Windows although I’ve only tested it on Linux. Running the server on Linux you also need to configure iptables to translate your private ‘vpn’ ip address to an external ip address on the vpn server.

Continue reading ‘Running OpenVPN’ »

I get a lot of people asking me about running Asterisk on a VPS. It’s a great way to get started and experiment with Asterisk and find out what it can do.

If you’ve used something like Skype or Vonage before then you’ll have an idea what you can do with VOIP but running your own Asterisk server makes things so much more flexible.

If you combine Asterisk with FreePBX, a great web interface for configuring Asterisk, then you’ll have an extremely capable PBX. There are many plugin modules available for FreePBX which provide an easy way to setup advanced features such as voicemail, IVRs, follow-me, time conditions, conferencing …

It is possible to run Asterisk on pretty much any VPS but you’ll definitely have a better experince using a VPS specifically designed for running Asterisk. A couple of features that may not be available with a ‘normal’ VPS is the ztdummy driver and high quality bandwidth.

Continue reading ‘Asterisk on a VPS’ »

If you’re running Asterisk on a VPS or a dedicated server then setting up your iptables firewall can be a tricky.

I thought I’d post my firewall script to help get you started. I save this script as /usr/local/bin/firewall.sh and then add a line to run it from /etc/rc.local

It allows SSH’ing to the machine plus rules required for SIP connections (you will need other rules if you use IAX) plus some basic “bad stuff” filtering.

I’ve commented it so, hopefully, you’ll be able to figure out and chages you need.

Continue reading ‘iptables for asterisk’ »

As someone pointed out here another possibilty for these kind off error messages is that, if you’ve just changed the SSH port from 22 to something else for security, then there’s a good chance your firewall may be blocking the connection.

Redhat5/CentOS5 cetainly has a firewall enabled as default. Try ‘iptables –list’ to see if you’ve got iptables running

If you have your website, e-mail system, etc. running on your own VPS or dedicated server it’s good to know when that server is unavailable so you can contact your server provider asap.

The best way to do this is use an external monitoring company. I’ve been using Hyperspin for a couple of months now and it’s been working great.

You can pick what services/ports on your server to monitor (SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, etc.) and you can chose how to be alerted when they are not available. Obviously you need to make sure that you’re alerted via an out of band method (in other words don’t rely on an e-mail to an e-mail account on your VPS to know that your VPS is down!)

The Hyperspin website isn’t very pretty but overall their system is reliable and easy to use.

I run a backup script to backup my VPS’s every night using rsync. On one of my VPS’s I was seeing the error  “ssh: connect to host … port 22: Connection refused” at seeming random points.

It took me a while to track down the fact that lylix.com (the provider of my VPS) block multiple inbound and outbound ssh connections to a server made over a short period of time.

Whilst this is probably useful for some people, and will offer their VPS some protection from brute force login attempts, it broke my script! 

Continue reading ‘ssh: connect to host … port 22: Connection refused’ »