If like me you still have a requirement for a landline, or at least a landline number. Zen Internet offers a “digital voice” package as an accompaniment to its broadband service.
Traditionally this service is provided via its supplied Fritzbox router, utilising its FXS port to supply telephony to analogue devices.
As the service is SIP based, it is possible to connect direct via SIP phones or Asterisk which is ideal should the Fritzbox not be suitable for your requirements. While this is permitted by Zen, it is unsupported.
Here are a couple of examples of getting connected to Zen DV without the use of the Fritzbox.
I’ve been playing with KVM on Debian 12 as a candidate for moving away from VMware as a hypervisor on my home server. I’ve been testing by using Debian 12 as VM in ESXI set with hardware CPU/MMU enabled, and virtualisaion passthrough enabled.
I’d like the KVM guests to access the network in bridge mode of the host for direct access to the network. However I faced the following issue:
KVM host can ping gateway and internet.
KVM host can ping the guest.
Guest can ping the host.
Guest cannot ping gateway or anything outside of the host.
Guest is showing in router ARP table, with its IP address and own MAC
This one got me for more time than I wish to admit, and seems to have caught others out along the way, this is how I finally solved it…
The aim of deploying Zabbix and adding SNMP to Gentoo was to gain better insight on how an Asterisk PBX was performing.
Last of the hurdles was to get data from Asterisk in order to send to Zabbix, however the traditional way of loading the res_snmp.so module in Asterisk was not available, as while the PBX in question utilises Asterisk, its buried under proprietary licensing and a non-standard api, therefore being unable to either add the SNMP module or to query it.
If you are experiencing a similar situation, here is how to extract some stats from Asterisk 16 using SNMP, but without the SNMP module…
Recently we’ve moved from an aged Opsview instance to Zabbix for our system health monitoring, which in turn facilitated moving data collector agents from Nagios to snmp.
Many of our PBX’s were deployed from the vendors ISO and so run atop of Gentoo, and it has a couple of issues:
We’ve been told not to “emerge” anything by the vendor, as the base OS on the image is not maintained.
Portage (Gentoo’s package manager) has fallen out of date, meaning even if emerge is attempted, it’ll fail as all repository links are broke.
If faced with the same issue, this is how to install net-snmpd from source, add it a startup service and be able to monitor via snmp…
A few months ago a freshly retired Dell Poweredge T310 came back to the office, I plugged it into the network and left it off in the unlikely event it data was needed off it. It’s now I’m remote to the office, and need it’s data.
No problem I thought, use the iDrac to log into the ESXi console and set a new IP as it is statically assigned to a different subnet to the office…
Trouble is, the iDrac is so out of date I can’t get to its web interface on any browser available to my Windows 10 machine.
This is how to get access to an outdated iDrac 6 web interface and remote console…
There are occasions when the storage capacity of a virtual drive needs to be increased. In production environments a backup and re-install of an OS to a higher capacity provision may not be practical.
Many of our systems deployed from OVA’s use Gentoo as it’s base OS for inexplicable reasons, here’s how to increase the drive capacity of a VM instance running Gentoo and make the extra space usable…
2021 is here and so returns (In the UK at least) one of my favourite shows to Netflix, The Office (US). Since starting working in VoIP its hard not to notice what phones turn up in TV shows, here the Cisco 7960, was prolific for showing up in shows around this era.
So why not, nearly 16 years after the show started, try and get one of these working on an Asterisk PBX? At work we had a number of similar 7940 models that hadn’t be used for years, so why not give it a try…
Recently
I’ve had the opportunity to deploy and test a call centre PBX product to gauge
if its viable to offer as a product and how it will sit within our
infrastructure.
Installing and poking around the GUI is all well and good but to really find out how a PBX behaves it needs some traffic, to find outs its performance in regards to resources but also to find out what a vendor’s interpretation of an advertised feature actually is.
To generate sample calls, instead of registering handsets/softphones and dialling manually it would be better to automate this, and SIPp is the perfect tool for this.
I like this time of year, a chance to reflect on the last 12 months and take stock of accomplishments and realise the achievements. And something I like to gauge a success on is the longevity of a solution, and a time-lapse comparison 6 months apart is seemingly my go to example.
To elaborate on this achievement, earlier this year was the setup of a homebrew CCTV solution using an array of Raspberry Pi’s with cameras, and a VM Cent OS server acting as a PVR host. A surplus Pi W Zero was pointed at the hills and used as a time-lapse experiment.
The real achievement is that since its conception in early June,
it has been stable enough to run in the background, capturing footage for such an
occasion.
So here I present my latest time-lapse, a split screen video on the difference between a June day and a December day:
If you’d ever searched for Raspberry Pi projects that
involved a camera then the results would certainly include Motioneye OS, an
easy to use self-contained operating system that is truly (write then) plug and
play.
Looking for a CCTV project earlier this year I too was drawn in by this, and with my small abundance of RPi spares it was the cheapest choice, using a couple of RPi 3B+ for video, and a Zero W for time-lapse image capture. All processing was self-contained on each Pi with capture data passed over via SMB to a Windows file share.
This worked, but had a couple of problems that prevented it
from being trustworthy. Firstly, it stops recording video after a few days of
uptime, by creating empty files. And secondly the time-lapse camera seemed to
reset every few minutes that created in white out image capture as the camera’s
exposure setting recalibrated, ruining a time-lapse video.
Looking wider there was also the performance issue. In
Motioneye OS’ default state of managing all features, the highest FPS seemed to
max at 15 fps even on the Pi 3B+. Forums suggest this is due to the motion eye
daemon handling all the image processing in software, putting a strain on the Pi’s
modest CPU.
The idea and goal is to move the processing and IO
responsibilities to my server, which would be far more capable than the then
latest available RPi, and as I have chosen Cent OS to be my go-to Linux OS of
choice, this is what I’ll be using.
A gateway to make this possible is an option in Motioneye OS, Fast Network Camera. This when set relinquishes the Pi of all processing duties and serves to just stream the camera capture as best as possible via MJPEG.
Here’s how to set up Motioneye on a Cent OS server to be a central data hub for a network of RPi Motioneye OS cameras.
