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.

We have a Sun X4500 ‘Thumper’ that recently had a failed drive. Our zpools are all raidz2 with 4 spares. We were getting errors on the disk c1t5d0, although the drive hadn’t failed completely.

As we had not yet tested replacing a ‘live’ drive the disk was pulled from the system before running any commands to remove it from the pool.

You can run the following command to see the status of your pools -

Continue reading ‘Replacing a failed zpool ZFS drive’ »

The instructions below assume that you have got Asterisk, FreePBX and A2Billing installed and working together.

Below are the first steps in setting up a callwithis DID number and passing the call through to A2Billing. This number can then be used as an access number for your calling card clients.

Once you’ve signed up for your callwithus account and purchased your DID number the next thing you want to do is modify how your DID number gets presented to your Asterisk box so you can route it to a2billing.

On the callwithus website, click on DID on the left hand menu and then locate the DID number you want to use and click ‘edit’. Now under ‘DESTINATION’ add ‘/yourdidnumber’ the the end of ‘SIP/youraccountnumber’

This will cause callwithus to append your DID to the call details when it is passed through to your Asterisk server. See the image to the right for details.  

Next we want to go into FreePBX and register A2Billing as a ‘Custom Destination’.

If you don’t have the ‘Custom Destination’ menu in FreePBX you will need to go to the modules menu option and install the ‘Custom Applications’ module.
Enter ‘a2billing’ as the Description and ‘custom-a2billing,${EXTEN},1′ as the custom destination

Now we want to configure our callwithus trunk.

Configure your trunk as in the images here, obviously using your username and password. More information on how to setup your trunk can be found on the callwithus website here.

Now we just need to configure our inbound route. This inbound route decides what happens to a call when it is presented to your Asterisk server. Give it a meaningful description and then in the ‘DID Number’ box enter your callwithus DID in the same format you used in step one above.

Scroll down to the bottom of the configuration page and you should see the ‘a2billing’ ‘Custom Application’ that you setup earlier. Select this and then click on Submit. Don’t forget to click on ‘Apply Configuration’ at the top of the FreePBX page to get Asterisk to read your changes.

And that’s it for now. If you call your callwithus DID it should come to your Asterisk box and then be passed to a2billing. Depending on how you’ve got a2billing configured will determine what happens to that call now.

I’ll discuss in a later post some ideas about how to configure a2billing