There are some great videos around to give you an idea about what you can do with Asterisk and FreePBX.

Here are a selection -

Kerry Garrison, the senior product manager of Trixbox gives a quick tour of the installation and setup of Trixbox 2.2. The first half of this video concentrates on installing Trixbox but if you have a Trixbox VPS the hard work is done for you. Trixbox is now on version 2.4

Trixbox features. A nice run through of some of the features in FreePBX/Trixbox.

A good (and pretty long!) explanation of what you can do with Asterisk. This doesn’t include any information about FreePBX, the web based GUI.

I thought I’d run through what access/software you get when you purchase a sysadminman uk voip VPS.

To start with you get root access to your virtual private server. This behaves pretty much the same as if you had a dedicated server. The operating system is CentOS 5.2 (a free version of RedHat). You can install additional software on your VPS if required using yum (the CentOS package manager).

HyperVM is a control panel that allows you to reboot, power on/off,  troubleshoot, change the root password etc on your VPS. Also you have access to graphs that show you network, cpu and memory usage.
HyperVM includes a helpdesk ticket system where you can log support calls regarding any issues you are having with your VPS. UPDATE! (17/6/09) HYPERVM IS CURRENTLY NOT PROVIDED WITH YOUR VPS DUE TO ISSUES WITH HYPERVM

FreePBX is a web based control panel for Asterisk. As you can see from the screenshot you can configure things like extensions, routes, trunks, conferences, IVRs, voicemail, etc. FreePBX is configured to run over https by default. All of the web applications on the VPS use Lighttd – a lightweight web server that uses very little ram.

A2billing is a billing application designed for Asterisk. You can use it to keep track of your own costs or you could use it to resell calling cards or termination to your customers. Trunks can be configured using FreePBX and then utilized by A2billing so everything can be done from the gui. It is also possible to upload rate tables so if your SIP/IAX2 trunk supplier provides a csv file with their call rates in, then it’s normally possible to upload this. Usually some modification to the import file format is required.

A2billing also provides a customer interface so that your customers can see their call reports and add credit to their account.

All of the above are preinstalled on sysadminman built VPSs.

If you are interested in a voip VPS see here for details or please contact me with any questions

I’m a big fan of munin for monitoring your linux server. It’s quick and easy to install and produces some nice graphs.

I run some OpenVZ servers and wanted to get munin to alert me if there was a sudden spike in my bandwidth throughput.

There are some instructions here for setting up alerts from munin but I couldn’t get it to work for the “if_” plugin that is used to generate the bandwidth graphs.

Turns out that plugin doesn’t produce warnings as standard. Here’s a quick and easy solution that works for me (although there are some pitfalls – such as the fact that you’re setting a generic setting for all interfaces)

On the machine running ‘munin-node’ edit the file /usr/share/munin/plugins/if_   (the location may vary)

and add this line with all the other echo statements -

It’s in bits per second so that should set it to 1MB/s

Now on the machine running ‘munin’ (could be the same machine) edit the file /etc/munin/munin.conf and somewhere near the top add the lines -

And that should be it. Give it 5 minutes and see if you get an alert  (might be worth setting the warning level to less than 1MB/s to test!)