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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’ve been interested in trying to stream some of my videos from my server rather than from YouTube. YouTube is great but the video quality is pretty poor.

I’m running CentOS 5.2 and decided to just try installing ffmpeg from rpmforge rather than compiling it. Lazy but easy!

rpmforge is a repository where you can find lots of prebuilt packages that are not part of a standard Redhat/CentOS install. You can find instructions for setting it up here.

So, with rpmforge configured, this was all I needed

Then I looked round for a player to stream the video (which were going to be in flash format). Flowplayer looked pretty nice. I just wanted something simple that would have only the video and controls on the page.

After looking over the sample html pages that come with flowplayer it was easy to create a page with just the video on there. So I uploaded my videos which were in mpg format.

Running the command

converted the video to flash format with a pretty high quality but without making the files too large. I’m sure I could probably find better settings if I played around a bit more.

And here some examples of the end result -

http://video.sysadminman.net/takeoffsywell.html

http://video.sysadminman.net/alconbury.html

http://video.sysadminman.net/fisty_nuts.html

Just out of interest - the aircraft is a Pegasus Quantum 582 which you can see a picture of here.

I no longer own it and and miss the summer evenings flying around the english countryside.

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’ »