The first FreeSWITCH patch that calls SIP “Gateways” as Trunks

Ever wondered why in FreeSWITCH, registration and authentication to remote SIP endpoints are called gateways, not trunks? Well, it’s more of the fact that SIP never really defined what trunking is. For the people who don’t know what trunking is, it’s essentially a link to another remote Central Office for telephone switches in a Central Office or from a PABX to the Central Office via a T1 or TDM link.
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Lesson of the Day: Do Not Steal A Hacker’s Computer, Especially If You’re “Someone Who’s Less Competent Than a Keyboard Chimp”

This piece might sound old in the DEFCON/hacker community, but a hacker by the name Zoz had his Mac G4 desktop stolen back in 2008 or so. 2 years later a person by the name Melvin Guzman somehow got the machine online on a non-NATted IPv4 address, opening the window for Zoz to start his expedition on recovering his stolen desktop. The slides he presents might not be so work safe, although he clearly makes some effort on censoring the not work safe parts. Language is also present, so just don’t turn the speakers up if you’re at work.

If you’re an IT professional or something similar, you’ll find this video to be quite humorous in nature. For anyone else, the moral is: Don’t steal or mess around with a hacker’s computer. He also mentions that due to his poor security practices, he was able to use his “high tech” skills against “someone who’s less competent than a keyboard chimp”. So… If you’re one of those people who are in fact IT pros and recently had their laptops/desktops stolen, follow his examples and you’ll probably get it back… Eventually…

If you’re interested, the slides in high resolution detail are somewhere stashed in Google. Just go find them 😉

A Nice HOWTO on Installing FreeSwitch on Scientific/CentOS/RHEL 6-based Servers

Over the past year I’ve been experimenting FreeSwitch as my home based PBX solution and so far using it seems like quite a breeze. Installation was quite a breeze too when you don’t run into problems. Maintaining it was also quite a breeze… until you discover (quite rudely) the fact that a boot option should be appended on the GRUB configuration file with these newer RHEL-like 6 releases. (I’m talking about Scientific/CentOS here, not the real RHEL 6 product which a poor starving student at the moment could not afford.)

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Been Quite Some Time

Yes… It’s been quite some time…

Really? When was my last blog post… Hm…

The Common Core program’s almost come to it’s end… Just 6 more weeks and I’m out for the summer in the first year of my Telecom training. Some of you out there might think, why the heck am I doing telecom, it’s quite a long story and I won’t go there for any of you.

Just another year to strike down… And some of you may wonder what I’m doing on my weekends. Let’s say it’s mainly related to VoIP or trying to watch the latest episode of X series that just aired in Japan. Some flight simulation and real world driving time here and there… Just waiting for July to do my Class 7N road test…

And no, I don’t drive like your regular Johnny Six Pack… as a matter of fact, thanks to Microsoft Flight Simulator X, I drive quite safely… And learned how to observe procedures out there in the real world road conditions…

Okay, enough talking… Time to inject a VoIP app on my blog so any of you random people can voice spam me if you choose. For the impatient people, just terminate your SIP calls to sip:17788035949@vanpbx1.voip.curriegrad2004.ca. Sure I don’t care if you have my PSTN number that’s in the SIP URI… Call it, I don’t care. You might just be wasting your precious cell minutes or long distance minutes if you’re calling it from the good old PSTN network. Voice spam me from time to time, as I might just get bored… And oh, make sure your router actually knows how to transverse SIP sessions over NAT. Last time I checked, SIP does not play well with NATted networks…

An IGMPProxy init.d Script. (For Fedora/CentOS only again)

Yes, I’m at it again. This time it’s for IGMPProxy.

IGMPProxy is an IGMP snooper/proxy daemon for routing multicast packets across networks. Pretty useful for IPTV services like Telus TV or AT&T U-Verse.

Again, Google didn’t result in a working script, although a Russian tried to and failed to produce a working init script for IGMPProxy. Daemonize is required to run the daemon because for some reason the ‘daemon’ as claimed by IGMPProxy doesn’t work for some reason. Continue reading “An IGMPProxy init.d Script. (For Fedora/CentOS only again)”