Leaning with PBX in a Flash

So today I realized that the new PBX system wasn't secured from the outside world. The way we have things set up with it is eth0 is for the internal network, and eth1 is connected to the outside network, not being controlled by our firewall and DNS. That is where we connect to our SIP Trunk as well. So because of this, the phone system was a bit overly exposed to the cloud. So today I learned how to use WebMin and manage the IPTables that run on the system. So I changed a lot of rules to accept traffic only from eth0, thus locking out the outside world from some of the most easiest points of attack.

Then their was another thing that I found out today about the new system. It was using .htaccess lock to view voicemail. They tried to have admins add this back in March, but when I did, I didn't know my way around, and so I removed the locking file. But with this newer version, they had added it. So after spending lots of time trying to disable it, or find my way through it, I finally understood what the foram was saying for what to do about it. Here at http://www.pbxinaflash.com/community/index.php?threads/freepbx-2-10-latest-beta-voicemail-and-recordings-asks-for-auth-p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d.12407/ at about half way down where wardmundy is talking about what to do, it clicked what I needed to do. She gave the command to add a user for htaccess. She gave "htpasswd /usr/local/apache/p-a-s-s-w-d/wwwpasswd <username>". So I took that and started to enter it in and had to change it some. what I did was "htpasswd -bm /usr/local/apache/passwd/wwwpasswd <username> <password>" and that wrote a user in that file that I could share with everyone. So that was quite a learning experience for me, and a good one to know. 

Quick Report

So my boss today asked me if I could make a quick report that you can get to from the home page of our management site. So I touched up some of the things that the main page had, then created the page. Nothing new in it, but I did get to use the code I put for counting the days between two dates. Then I rounded that answer to 0 precision and then it gave me a number that looked clean and was whole days. Well, nothing much, but it's something. -Rob

Sorry for the delay and updates

Sorry for not righting regularly like I had hoped and started out. It's a habit that I haven't developed yet. There has been some projects that I have been working on since the last time I posted anything. Some new things learned, but not that much has happened. One reason is that I normally can get about 8 to 12 work days a month to program. The rest of the time is support and closing books/ledgers to the next month and then cleaning things up so the reports can reflect what truly went on that month. There is a set list of things that I check each month, and then I'll fix them or find out why they are the way that they are. But starting the middle of last month, things started to change as far as responsibilities at work went. The reason is that my co-worker that also programed along with me got a job for Ancestry.com, and so that slowly made me the head of the IT department. So the beginning of this month, I started out as the head, and shortly after that, we hired some one new so we had two programmers in the office. Also I got a nice pay raise because of my position change. But my old responsibilities hasn't changed much yet. I'm in the process of acquiring someone new to do support full time. After that person (who ever it might be) starts, then I can focus more on directing and programing.

One thing that I have been working on this week is to start moving our VoIP system over to a physical computer to run on. One of the problems we have been having, and seems that it's not that uncommon with running the VoIP server on an VM is the jitter getting to be bad enough where the server has to re-sync the audio during a phone conversation. That means that there will be 3-5 seconds where audio cannot be heard one way or the other, or both parties cannot hear each other. We have tried to dedicate a whole processor to the VM, but that didn't fix the problem. So the next solution is to move to a physical box for the phone server. So this past week I got the hardware for it from NewEgg.com and put it together. Then Wednesday through Friday I have been working on it where I could to get it set to be the phone server for the office. So last week I got to the point where I feel comfortable to start configuring the actual PBX portion of the server this week. I'll try to keep everyone in the loop ask things go along. And I'll also try better to keep adding thing to this blog. -Rob