CentOS/SL Platform

Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Compromise All FreePBX Systems

Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Compromise All FreePBX Systems

Sunday, September 17, 2023

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If you’re a user of Asterisk® and FreePBX®, the DEFCON 31 Conference in Las Vegas did not disappoint this year. It exposed not one but three critical, unpatched vulnerabilities in affected FreePBX-based platforms that can compromise your servers in under a minute. I would hasten to add that all of these vulnerabilities were disclosed to Sangoma® months ago and, to this day, remain unaddressed. What this means is any hacker gets administrator privileges on your server with a blank check… Read More ›

Meet the $500 Multi-Purpose Powerhouse: The Acer Aspire 5

Meet the $500 Multi-Purpose Powerhouse: The Acer Aspire 5

Monday, August 21, 2023

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We review lots of hardware and numerous operating systems, but none come close to this steal from Amazon for under $500. The Acer Aspire 5 comes in many flavors at many price points. But, if loads of RAM (20GB) and a huge storage capacity (1TB NVMe SSD) top your list of must-haves, nothing we’ve found can touch this deal. The rest of its pedigree is equally impressive: a Ryzen 3 3350U 4-core processor (up to 3.5GHz), backlit keyboard, fingerprint reader… Read More ›

Summer Break: Catching Up on Nerd Vittles Happenings

Summer Break: Catching Up on Nerd Vittles Happenings

Monday, July 24, 2023

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Nerd Vittles has been churning out technology articles for well over a decade. And, while you’re enjoying your time off this summer, we thought you might enjoy catching up on some of our most-read articles. According to Google Analytics, these were the most recent top picks from the 1.2+ million visitors who have dropped in to Nerd Vittles these past 10 years.   Our Favorite All-You-Can-Eat Deals in Cyberspace is self-explanatory covering a free cloud offering, domains at cost, VPN… Read More ›

Building a Dirt-Cheap Communications Platform with VoIP

Building a Dirt-Cheap Communications Platform with VoIP

Monday, July 10, 2023

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There are literally thousands of options when you finally ditch your landline and stagger into the VoIP world. We’re often asked, "What would you recommend if price was the major criteria?" Our response goes something like this. You get what you pay for and our recommended providers continue to be ClearlyIP and Skyetel in no particular order. Having said that, if price is your primary consideration, here’s our Plan B which we use regularly. First, a word of explanation. This… Read More ›

Interconnecting Incredible PBX Servers with PJsip

Interconnecting Incredible PBX Servers with PJsip

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

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Much has been made of the lack of multi-tenant functionality with Asterisk® and FreePBX®. Today we’ll show you how to interconnect as many Asterisk servers as you like and make transparent calls between all of them at zero cost. Setup time is under 5 minutes per server. When you couple PBXs with distributed infrastructure and inexpensive cloud servers costing $25 or less a year and on-premise virtual machine platforms including Proxmox, VMware ESXi, VirtualBox, Windows 11 WSL, and Mac UTM,… Read More ›

Our Favorite All-You-Can-Eat Deals in Cyberspace

Our Favorite All-You-Can-Eat Deals in Cyberspace

Monday, May 15, 2023

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Let’s begin with a mea culpa. We’ve been wrong on a few all-you-can-eat deals over the years including the CloudAtCost switcheroo, the Google Voice fiasco, and a few other cloud provider implosions. But our overall track record has been pretty good over the past decade, and today we have some fresh deals that are worth a careful look. We, of course, would encourage everyone to perform their own due diligence and at least acknowledge the cautionary note: "If a deal… Read More ›

The Beauty of Incredible PBX: ClearlyIP Module Management

The Beauty of Incredible PBX: ClearlyIP Module Management

Monday, April 17, 2023

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When Incredible PBX was released, you may recall that we jettisoned reliance on FreePBX® repositories and adopted Clearly IP’s far superior repository setup for FreePBX module management. Most of you have never noticed… until today. As lady luck would have it, Sangoma recently released a buggy version of the User Control Panel (UCP) module which literally blows up when you next attempt to access UCP. One of the hidden beauties of Incredible PBX is that we now have version control… Read More ›

The Ambidextrous Laptop: A Perfect Fit for Asterisk and VoIP

The Ambidextrous Laptop: A Perfect Fit for Asterisk and VoIP

Monday, April 10, 2023

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Until we bought a 15-inch Windows laptop with 20 gigs of RAM and a 1 terabyte NVMe SSD for under $500, we never would have considered such a computer an ideal virtual machine platform. And, to our surprise, with Windows 11 and a 4-core Ryzen 3 processor, it not only ran VirtualBox flawlessly, but Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSLg) also performed admirably.   And then we tried out the UTM virtual machine platform on one of Apple’s new MacBook… Read More ›