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The Most Versatile VoIP Provider: FREE PORTING

Desktop Dream Machine: Incredible PBX 16-15 for VirtualBox


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If you’re new to the VoIP world and want to kick the tires to see what you’re missing, then today’s one minute setup is for you. You’ll get a $10 credit to try out some penny-a-minute calls and to purchase a $1 a month phone number in your choice of area codes. If you decide VoIP is not for you, you don’t have to buy anything ever. And you can use almost any desktop computer you already own to bring up the VirtualBox® edition of Incredible PBX® 16-15.

If you’ve followed Nerd Vittles over the years, you already know that VirtualBox from Oracle® is one of our favorite platforms. Once VirtualBox is installed on your desktop computer, adding Incredible PBX is a snap. Download the latest Incredible PBX image from SourceForge, double-click on the downloaded image, check the initialize MAC address box, and boom. In less than a minute, your PBX is ready to use. There are no hidden fees or crippleware to hinder your use of Incredible PBX for as long as you like. Just set up an account with our Platinum provider, Skyetel, and you can start making calls in minutes. Of course, the Incredible PBX feature set is included as well which brings you nearly three dozen applications for Asterisk® that will revolutionize your communications platform. Speech-to-text, voice recognition, and a Siri-like telephony interface are as close as your SIP phone.

Installing Oracle VM VirtualBox

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Oracle’s virtual machine platform inherited from Sun is amazing. It’s not only free, but it’s pure GPL2 code. VirtualBox gives you a virtual machine platform that runs on top of any desktop operating system. In terms of limitations, we haven’t found any. We even tested this on an Atom-based Windows 7 machine with 2GB of RAM, and it worked without a hiccup. So step #1 today is to download one or more of the VirtualBox installers from VirtualBox.org or Oracle.com. Our recommendation is to put all of the 100MB installers on a 4GB thumb drive.1 Then you’ll have everything in one place whenever and wherever you happen to need it. Once you’ve downloaded the software, simply install it onto your favorite desktop machine. Accept all of the default settings, and you’ll be good to go. For more details, here’s a link to the Oracle VM VirtualBox User Manual.

Installing the Incredible PBX 16-15 Image

To begin, download the Incredible PBX 16-15 image (3.2 GB) onto your desktop.

Next, double-click on the Incredible PBX .ova image on your desktop. Be sure to check the box to initialize the MAC address of the image and then click Import. Once the import is finished, you’ll see a new Incredible PBX virtual machine in the VM List of the VirtualBox Manager Window. Let’s make a couple of one-time adjustments to the Incredible PBX configuration to account for possible differences in sound and network cards on different host machines.

(1) Click once on the Incredible PBX virtual machine in the VM List. Then (2) click the Settings button. In the Audio tab, check the Enable Audio option and choose your sound card. In the Network tab for Adapter 1, check the Enable Network Adapter option. From the Attached to pull-down menu, choose Bridged Adapter. Then select your network card from the Name list. Then click OK. That’s all the configuration that is necessary for Incredible PBX.

Running Incredible PBX 16-15 in VirtualBox

Once you’ve imported and configured the Incredible PBX Virtual Machine, you’re ready to go. Highlight the Incredible PBX virtual machine in the VM List on the VirtualBox Manager Window and click the Start button. The standard Linux boot procedure will begin and, within a few seconds, you’ll get the familiar Linux login prompt. During the bootstrap procedure, you’ll see a couple of dialogue boxes pop up that explain the keystrokes to move back and forth between your host operating system desktop and your virtual machine. Remember, you still have full access to your desktop computer. Incredible PBX is merely running as a task in a VM window. Always gracefully halt Incredible PBX just as you would on any computer.

Here’s what you need to know. To work in the Incredible PBX virtual machine, just left-click your mouse while it is positioned inside the VM window. To return to your host operating system desktop, press the right Option key on Windows machines or the left Command key on any Mac. For other operating systems, read the dialogue boxes for instructions on moving around. To access the Linux CLI, login as root with the default password: password. Change your root password immediately by typing: passwd. Then update your admin password for web access by typing: ./admin-pw-change. You’ll need the admin password to access the web GUI and manage your PBX. You can update all of your other passwords using the scripts provided in /root.

Setting the Date and Time with VirtualBox

On some platforms, VirtualBox has a nasty habit of mangling the date and time of your virtual machine. Typing date will tell you whether your VM is affected. If it’s a problem, manually set the date and time and then update the hardware clock. Here’s how assuming 08130709 is the month, day, and correct time of your server:

date 08130709
clock -w

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Configuring Skyetel for Incredible PBX 16-15

If you’d like to try out the Skyetel service at no charge, here’s the drill. Sign up for Skyetel service to take advantage of the Nerd Vittles specials. First, complete the Prequalification Form here. You then will be provided a link to the Skyetel site to complete your registration. Once you have registered on the Skyetel site and your account has been activated, open a support ticket and request the $10 credit for your account by referencing the Nerd Vittles special offer. Once you are satisfied with the service, fund your account as desired, and Skyetel will match your deposit of up to $250 simply by opening another ticket. That gets you up to $500 of half-price calling. Credit is limited to one per person, company, and address. Effective 10/1/2023, $25/month minimum spend required.

Skyetel does not use SIP registrations to make connections to your PBX. Instead, Skyetel utilizes Endpoint Groups to identify which servers can communicate with the Skyetel service. An Endpoint Group consists of a Name, an IP address, a UDP or TCP port for the connection, and a numerical Priority for the group. For incoming calls destined to your PBX, DIDs are associated with an Endpoint Group to route the calls to your PBX. For outgoing calls from your PBX, a matching Endpoint Group is required to authorize outbound calls through the Skyetel network. Thus, the first step in configuring the Skyetel side for use with your PBX is to set up an Endpoint Group. Here’s a typical setup for Incredible PBX 16-15:

  • Name: MyPBX
  • Priority: 1
  • IP Address: PBX-Public-IP-Address
  • Port: 5060
  • Protocol: UDP
  • Description: my.incrediblepbx.com

To receive incoming PSTN calls, you’ll need at least one DID. On the Skyetel site, you acquire DIDs under the Phone Numbers tab. You have the option of Porting in Existing Numbers (free for the first 60 days after you sign up for service) or purchasing new ones under the Buy Phone Numbers menu option.

Once you have acquired one or more DIDs, navigate to the Local Numbers or Toll Free Numbers tab and specify the desired SIP Format and Endpoint Group for each DID. Add SMS/MMS and E911 support, if desired. Call Forwarding and Failover are also supported. That completes the VoIP setup on the Skyetel side. System Status is always available here.

Configuring VoIP.ms for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for VoIP.ms service, may we suggest you use our signup link so that Nerd Vittles gets a referral credit for your signup. Once your account is set up, you’ll need to set up a SIP SubAccount and, for Authentication Type, choose Static IP Authentication and enter your Incredible PBX 16-15 server’s public IP address. For Transport, choose UDP. For Device Type, choose Asterisk, IP PBX, Gateway or VoIP Switch. Order a DID in their web panel, and then point the DID to the SubAccount you just created. Be sure to specify atlanta1.voip.ms as the POP from which to receive incoming calls.

Configuring V1VoIP for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for V1VoIP service, sign up on their web site. Then login to your account and order a DID under the DIDs tab. Once the DID has been assigned, choose View DIDs and click on the Forwarding button beside your DID. For Option #1, choose Forward to IP Address/PBX. For the Forwarding Address, enter the public IP address of your server. For the T/O (timeout) value, set it to 2o seconds. Then click the Update button. Under the Termination tab, create a new Endpoint with the public IP address of your server so that you can place outbound calls through V1VoIP.

Configuring Anveo Direct for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for Anveo Direct service, sign up on their web site and then login. After adding funds to your account, purchase a DID under Inbound Service -> Order DID. Next, choose Configure Destination SIP Trunk. Give the Trunk a name. For the Primary SIP URI, enter $[E164]$@server-IP-address. For Call Options, select your new DID from the list. You also must whitelist your public IP address under Outbound Service -> Configure. Create a new Call Termination Trunk and name it to match your server. For Dialing Prefix, choose six alphanumeric characters beginning with a zero. In Authorized IP Addresses, enter the public IP address of your server. Set an appropriate rate cap. We like $0.01 per minute to be safe. Set a concurrent calls limit. We like 2. For the Call Routing Method, choose Least Cost unless you’re feeling extravagant. For Routes/Carriers, choose Standard Routes. Write down your Dialing Prefix and then click the Save button.

Before you can make outbound calls through Anveo Direct from your PBX, you first must configure the Dialing Prefix that you wrote down in the previous step. Log into the GUI as admin using a web browser and edit the Anveo-Out trunk in Connectivity -> Trunks. Click on the custom-Settings tab and replace anveo-pin with your actual Dialing Prefix. Click Submit and Apply Config to complete the setup.

By default, incoming Anveo Direct calls will be processed by the Default inbound route on your PBX. If you wish to redirect incoming Anveo Direct calls using DID-specific inbound routes, then you’ve got a bit more work to do. In addition to creating the inbound route using the 11-digit Anveo Direct DID, enter the following commands after logging into your server as root using SSH/Putty:

cd /etc/asterisk
echo "[from-anveo]" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,1,Ringing" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,n,Goto(from-trunk,\${SIP_HEADER(X-anveo-e164)},1)" >> extensions_custom.conf
asterisk -rx "dialplan reload"

Configuring a Softphone for Incredible PBX 16-15

We’re in the home stretch now. You can connect virtually any kind of telephone to your new PBX. Plain Old Phones require an analog telephone adapter (ATA) which can be a separate board in your computer from a company such as Digium. Or it can be a standalone SIP device such as ObiHai’s OBi100 or OBi110 (if you have a phone line from Ma Bell to hook up as well). SIP phones can be connected directly so long as they have an IP address. These could be hardware devices or software devices such as the YateClient softphone. We’ll start with a free one today so you can begin making calls. You can find dozens of recommendations for hardware-based SIP phones both on Nerd Vittles and the PIAF Forum when you’re ready to get serious about VoIP telephony.

We recommend YateClient which is free. Download it from here. Run YateClient once you’ve installed it and enter the credentials for the 701 extension on Incredible PBX. You can find them by running /root/show-passwords. You’ll need the IP address of your server plus your extension 701 password. In the YateClient, fill in the blanks using the IP address of your Server, 701 for your Username, and whatever Password was assigned to the extension when you installed Incredible PBX. Click OK to save your entries.

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Configuring Incredible PBX for VirtualBox

In order to take advantage of all the Incredible PBX applications, you’ll need to obtain IBM text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-text (STT) credentials as well as a (free) Application ID for Wolfram Alpha.

This Nerd Vittles tutorial will walk you through getting your IBM account set up and obtaining both your TTS and STT credentials. Be sure to write down BOTH sets of credentials which you’ll need in a minute. For home and SOHO use, IBM access and services are mostly FREE even though you must provide a credit card when signing up. The IBM signup process explains their pricing plans.

To use Wolfram Alpha, sign up for a free Wolfram Alpha API account. Just provide your email address and set up a password. It takes less than a minute. Log into your account and click on Get An App ID. Make up a name for your application and write down (and keep secret) your APP-ID code. That’s all there is to getting set up with Wolfram Alpha. If you want to explore costs for commercial use, there are links to let you get more information.

In addition to your Wolfram Alpha APPID, there are two sets of IBM credentials to plug into the Asterisk AGI scripts. Keep in mind that there are different usernames and passwords for the IBM Watson TTS and STT services. The TTS credentials will look like the following: $IBM_username and $IBM_password. The STT credentials look like this: $API_USERNAME and $API_PASSWORD. Don’t mix them up. 🙂

All of the scripts requiring credentials are located in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin so switch to that directory after logging into your server as root. Edit each of the following files and insert your TTS credentials in the variables already provided: nv-today2.php, ibmtts.php, and ibmtts2.php. Edit each of the following files and insert your STT credentials in the variables already provided: getquery.sh, getnumber.sh, and getnumber2.sh. Finally, edit 4747 and insert your Wolfram Alpha APPID.

Using Asteridex with Incredible PBX

AsteriDex is a web-based dialer and address book application for Asterisk and Incredible PBX. It lets you store and manage phone numbers of all your friends and business associates in an easy-to-use SQLite3 database. You simply call up the application with your favorite web browser: http://pbx-ip-address/asteridex4/. When you click on a contact that you wish to call, AsteriDex first calls you at extension 701, and then AsteriDex connects you to your contact through another outbound call made using your default outbound trunk that supports numbers in the 1NXXNXXXXXX format.

Taking Incredible PBX for a Test Drive

You can take Incredible PBX on a test drive by dialing D-E-M-O (3366) from any phone connected to your PBX.

With Allison’s Demo IVR, you can choose from the following options:

  • 0. Chat with Operator — connects to extension 701
  • 1. AsteriDex Voice Dialer – say "Delta Airlines" or "American Airlines" to connect
  • 2. Conferencing – log in using 1234 as the conference PIN
  • 3. Wolfram Alpha Almanac – say "What planes are flying overhead"
  • 4. Lenny – The Telemarketer’s Worst Nightmare
  • 5. Today’s News Headlines — courtesy of Yahoo! News
  • 6. Weather by ZIP Code – enter any 5-digit ZIP code for today’s weather
  • 7. Today in History — courtesy of OnThisDay.com
  • 8. Chat with Nerd Uno — courtesy of SIP URI connection to 3CX iPhone Client
  • 9. DISA Voice Dialer — say any 10-digit number to be connected
  • *. Current Date and Time — courtesy of Incredible PBX

Originally published: Monday, September 23, 2019


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Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

blankBOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

blankThe lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

blankVitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

blankSpecial Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



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  1. Many of our purchase links refer users to Amazon when we find their prices are competitive for the recommended products. Nerd Vittles receives a small referral fee from Amazon to help cover the costs of our blog. We never recommend particular products solely to generate Amazon commissions. However, when pricing is comparable or availability is favorable, we support Amazon because Amazon supports us. []

Honeymoon Time: Meet Incredible PBX 16-15.2 for CentOS 7


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After two months of development, we are pleased to announce the production-ready release of Incredible PBX 16-15 on the CentOS 7 platform with the latest Asterisk® 16 and FreePBX® 15 components. After years of frustrating upgrades, we are equally pleased to announce that those running Incredible PBX 13-13 can upgrade to the new Incredible PBX 16-15 platform with a handful of button clicks. And you’ll never miss a beat. What are you waiting for?

In addition to the latest Asterisk 16 release, you also get the entire FreePBX 15 GPL module collection including their new User Control Panel (UCP) and a much enhanced web GUI plus the entire Incredible PBX feature set. As with Incredible PBX LITE, it’s plug-and-play with immediate calling capability using any of four commercial SIP providers. Or you can choose one of 16 other preconfigured SIP providers, enter your credentials, and enjoy instant connectivity without worrying about SIP settings. Last, but not least, you can easily turn your Incredible PBX 16-15 server into a secure public-facing PBX or interconnect a Raspberry Pi for traveling so that you never miss a call.

What’s Included? Incredible PBX 16-15 serves up a VoIP powerhouse featuring Asterisk 16, the FreePBX 15 GPL platform including User Control Panel (UCP), an Apache web server, the latest MariaDB SQL server (formerly MySQL), SendMail, and the Incredible PBX feature set including SIP, SMS, Opus, voice recognition, PicoTTS Text-to-Speech VoIP applications plus fax support, Click-to-Dial, News, Weather, Reminders, ODBC, and hundreds of features that typically are found in commercial PBXs: Conferencing, IVRs and AutoAttendants, Email Delivery of Voicemails, and much more.

Choosing a SIP Provider. Incredible PBX 16-15 comes preconfigured with support for five SIP extensions and four of the major SIP providers: Skyetel, VoIP.ms, V1VoIP, and Anveo Direct. We obviously hope you’ll choose Skyetel not only because they financially support Nerd Vittles and our open source projects, but also because it is a clearly superior platform offering crystal-clear communications and triple-redundancy so you never miss a call. Skyetel also sets itself apart from the other providers in the support department. They actually respond to issues, and there’s never a charge. As the old saying goes, they may not be the cheapest, but you get what you pay for. Even without taking advantage of Nerd Vittles half-price offer on up to $500 of Skyetel services, they’re still dirt cheap compared to the Bell Sisters and cable companies. Skyetel is so sure you’ll love their service that they give you a $10 credit to kick the tires before you ever spend a dime. Traditional DIDs are $1 per month. Outbound conversational calls are $0.012 per minute. Incoming conversational calls are a penny a minute, and CallerID lookups are $0.004. You only pay for minutes you use. Once you’re satisfied with the service and fund your account, you can port in your existing DIDs at no cost for 60 days after signup. In short, you have nothing to lose by trying out the Skyetel service. Effective 10/1/2023, $25/month minimum spend required.

Choosing a Platform for Incredible PBX 16-15

As with our other open source offerings, the platform choice for Incredible PBX 16-15 depends upon a number of factors. For most folks, you’d be crazy to go out and purchase hardware to use in your home or office when cloud-based platforms are available for about a dollar a month. Unless you plan to publicly expose your server on the Internet to facilitate remote SIP connections, the OpenVZ offerings below are perfectly adequate while in business with the cautionary note that you need off-site backups AND a tested backup plan. Three providers previously listed have closed their doors in 2019. You’ve been warned.

ProviderRAMDiskBandwidthPerformance as of 12/1/19Cost
CrownCloud KVM (LA)1GB20GB +
Snapshot
1TB/month598Mb/DN 281Mb/UP
2CPU Core
$25/year
Best Buy!
Naranjatech KVM (The Netherlands)1GB20GB1TB/monthHosting since 2005
VAT: EU res.
20€/year w/code:
SBF2019
BudgetNode KVM (LA)1GB40GB RAID101TB/monthAlso available in U.K PM @Ishaq on LET before payment$24/year
FreeRangeCloud KVM (Ashburn VA, Winnipeg, Freemont CA)1GB20GB SSD3TB/monthPick EGG loc'n
Open ticket for last 5GB SSD
$30/year w/code:
LEBEGG30

Installing Incredible PBX 16-15 with CentOS 7

9/21 ALERT UPDATE: A recent SolusVM update has broken systemd upon which Incredible PBX and Asterisk depend. SolusVM is the virtualizer used by many of the bargain-basement cloud providers. For the time being, these installs fail so you are cautioned to avoid any SolusVM-based cloud platform. Vultr, Digital Ocean, and OVH are your best bets at the moment. And Vultr and Digital Ocean both support Nerd Vittles through referral credits. We will post an update when the situation changes.

If you’ve installed previous iterations of Incredible PBX, today’s drill is similar. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the install procedure for Incredible PBX 16-15. Begin by installing a minimal CentOS 7 (64-bit) platform or pick the CentOS 7 option with 1GB RAM and 20GB of storage from your cloud provider’s menu of choices. Then log into your server as root and issue the following commands:

passwd
yum -y update
yum -y install net-tools nano wget tar
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx16-15.2.tar.gz
tar zxvf incrediblepbx16-15.2.tar.gz
rm -f incrediblepbx16-15.2.tar.gz
# to add swap file on non-OpenVZ cloud platforms with no swap file
./create-swapfile-DO
# kick off Phase I install
./IncrediblePBX16-15.sh
# after reboot, kick off Phase II install
./IncrediblePBX16-15.sh
# add HylaFax/AvantFax, if desired
./incrediblefax16.sh
# set desired timezone
./timezone-setup
# display your passwords
./show-passwords
# remember to enable TUN/TAP if using VPS Control Panel with OpenVZ
# reconfigure PortKnocker if installing on an OpenVZ platform
echo 'OPTIONS="-i venet0:0"' >> /etc/sysconfig/knockd
service knockd restart
# set up NeoRouter VPN client, if desired
nrclientcmd
# check network speed
wget -O speedtest-cli https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py
chmod +x speedtest-cli
./speedtest-cli

WebMin is also installed and configured as part of the base install. The root password for access is the same as your Linux root password. We strongly recommend that you not use WebMin to make configuration changes to your server. You may inadvertently damage the operation of your PBX beyond repair. WebMin is an excellent tool to LOOK at how your server is configured. When used for that purpose, we highly recommend WebMin as a way to become familiar with your Linux configuration.

Planning Ahead for That Rainy Day

If you haven’t already learned the hard way, let us save you from a future shock. Hardware fails. All of it. So spend an extra hour now so that you’ll be prepared when (not if) disaster strikes. First, once you have your new PBX configured the way you plan to use it, make a backup of your PBX by running the Incredible Backup script: /root/incrediblebackup16

Copy down the name of the backup file that was created. You’ll need it in a few minutes.

Second, build yourself an identical VirtualBox platform on your desktop PC. It’s the same steps as outlined above.

Next, create a /backup folder on your VirtualBox PBX and copy the backup file from your main server to your VirtualBox server and restore it after logging in to VirtualBox PBX as root:

mkdir /backup
scp root@main-pbx-ip-address:/backup/backup-file-name.tar.gz /backup/.
/root/incrediblerestore16 /backup/backup-file-name.tar.gz

Complaints that you "forgot" to make a backup and your hardware has failed or your provider has gone out of business are not welcomed. We’re sorry for your loss. Case closed.

Completing the Incredible PBX Setup Procedure

Unless your desktop PC and server are both on the same private LAN, the install procedure should be performed from a desktop PC using SSH or Putty. This will insure that your desktop PC is also whitelisted in the Incredible PBX firewall. Using the console to perform the install is NOT recommended as your desktop PC will not be whitelisted in the firewall. This may result in your not being able to log in to your server. Once you have network connectivity, log in to your server as root from a desktop PC using your root password. Accept the license agreement by pressing ENTER.

Kick off the Phase I install. Once your server reboots and you log back in as root, start the Phase II install. All of your passwords will be randomly assigned with the exception of the root user Linux password. You can set it at any time by issuing the command: passwd. You also must set up an admin password to access the FreePBX web GUI with the command: /root/admin-pw-change. With the exception of your root user and FreePBX admin passwords, most of the remaining passwords can be displayed using the command: /root/show-passwords.

Finally, if your PBX is sitting behind a NAT-based router, you’ll need to redirect incoming UDP 5060 and UDP 10000-20000 traffic to the private IP address of your PBX. This is required for all of the SIP providers included in the Incredible PBX 16-15 default build that don’t require a SIP registration. Otherwise, inbound calls will fail.

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Configuring Skyetel for Incredible PBX 16-15

If you’ve decided to go with Skyetel, here’s the drill. Sign up for Skyetel service and take advantage of the Nerd Vittles specials. First, complete the Prequalification Form here. You then will be provided a link to the Skyetel site to complete your registration. Once you have registered on the Skyetel site and your account has been activated, open a support ticket and request the $10 credit for your account by referencing the Nerd Vittles special offer. Once you are satisfied with the service, fund your account as desired, and Skyetel will match your deposit of up to $250 simply by opening another ticket. That gets you up to $500 of half-price calling. Credit is limited to one per person/company/address/location.

Skyetel does not use SIP registrations to make connections to your PBX. Instead, Skyetel utilizes Endpoint Groups to identify which servers can communicate with the Skyetel service. An Endpoint Group consists of a Name, an IP address, a UDP or TCP port for the connection, and a numerical Priority for the group. For incoming calls destined to your PBX, DIDs are associated with an Endpoint Group to route the calls to your PBX. For outgoing calls from your PBX, a matching Endpoint Group is required to authorize outbound calls through the Skyetel network. Thus, the first step in configuring the Skyetel side for use with your PBX is to set up an Endpoint Group. Here’s a typical setup for Incredible PBX 16-15:

  • Name: MyPBX
  • Priority: 1
  • IP Address: PBX-Public-IP-Address
  • Port: 5060
  • Protocol: UDP
  • Description: my.incrediblepbx.com

To receive incoming PSTN calls, you’ll need at least one DID. On the Skyetel site, you acquire DIDs under the Phone Numbers tab. You have the option of Porting in Existing Numbers (free for the first 60 days after you sign up for service) or purchasing new ones under the Buy Phone Numbers menu option.

Once you have acquired one or more DIDs, navigate to the Local Numbers or Toll Free Numbers tab and specify the desired SIP Format and Endpoint Group for each DID. Add SMS/MMS and E911 support, if desired. Call Forwarding and Failover are also supported. That completes the VoIP setup on the Skyetel side. System Status is always available here.

Configuring VoIP.ms for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for VoIP.ms service, may we suggest you use our signup link so that Nerd Vittles gets a referral credit for your signup. Once your account is set up, you’ll need to set up a SIP SubAccount and, for Authentication Type, choose Static IP Authentication and enter your Incredible PBX 16-15 server’s public IP address. For Transport, choose UDP. For Device Type, choose Asterisk, IP PBX, Gateway or VoIP Switch. Order a DID in their web panel, and then point the DID to the SubAccount you just created. Be sure to specify atlanta1.voip.ms as the POP from which to receive incoming calls.

Configuring V1VoIP for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for V1VoIP service, sign up on their web site. Then login to your account and order a DID under the DIDs tab. Once the DID has been assigned, choose View DIDs and click on the Forwarding button beside your DID. For Option #1, choose Forward to IP Address/PBX. For the Forwarding Address, enter the public IP address of your server. For the T/O (timeout) value, set it to 2o seconds. Then click the Update button. Under the Termination tab, create a new Endpoint with the public IP address of your server so that you can place outbound calls through V1VoIP.

Configuring Anveo Direct for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for Anveo Direct service, sign up on their web site and then login. After adding funds to your account, purchase a DID under Inbound Service -> Order DID. Next, choose Configure Destination SIP Trunk. Give the Trunk a name. For the Primary SIP URI, enter $[E164]$@server-IP-address. For Call Options, select your new DID from the list. You also must whitelist your public IP address under Outbound Service -> Configure. Create a new Call Termination Trunk and name it to match your server. For Dialing Prefix, choose six alphanumeric characters beginning with a zero. In Authorized IP Addresses, enter the public IP address of your server. Set an appropriate rate cap. We like $0.01 per minute to be safe. Set a concurrent calls limit. We like 2. For the Call Routing Method, choose Least Cost unless you’re feeling extravagant. For Routes/Carriers, choose Standard Routes. Write down your Dialing Prefix and then click the Save button.

Before you can make outbound calls through Anveo Direct from your PBX, you first must configure the Dialing Prefix that you wrote down in the previous step. Log into the GUI as admin using a web browser and edit the Anveo-Out trunk in Connectivity -> Trunks. Click on the custom-Settings tab and replace anveo-pin with your actual Dialing Prefix. Click Submit and Apply Config to complete the setup.

By default, incoming Anveo Direct calls will be processed by the Default inbound route on your PBX. If you wish to redirect incoming Anveo Direct calls using DID-specific inbound routes, then you’ve got a bit more work to do. In addition to creating the inbound route using the 11-digit Anveo Direct DID, enter the following commands after logging into your server as root using SSH/Putty:

cd /etc/asterisk
echo "[from-anveo]" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,1,Ringing" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,n,Goto(from-trunk,\${SIP_HEADER(X-anveo-e164)},1)" >> extensions_custom.conf
asterisk -rx "dialplan reload"

Configuring a Softphone for Incredible PBX 16-15

We’re in the home stretch now. You can connect virtually any kind of telephone to your new PBX. Plain Old Phones require an analog telephone adapter (ATA) which can be a separate board in your computer from a company such as Digium. Or it can be a standalone SIP device such as ObiHai’s OBi100 or OBi110 (if you have a phone line from Ma Bell to hook up as well). SIP phones can be connected directly so long as they have an IP address. These could be hardware devices or software devices such as the YateClient softphone. We’ll start with a free one today so you can begin making calls. You can find dozens of recommendations for hardware-based SIP phones both on Nerd Vittles and the PIAF Forum when you’re ready to get serious about VoIP telephony.

We recommend YateClient which is free. Download it from here. Run YateClient once you’ve installed it and enter the credentials for the 701 extension on Incredible PBX. You can find them by running /root/show-passwords. You’ll need the IP address of your server plus your extension 701 password. In the YateClient, fill in the blanks using the IP address of your Server, 701 for your Username, and whatever Password was assigned to the extension when you installed Incredible PBX. Click OK to save your entries.

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Once you are registered to extension 701, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place some test calls to the numerous apps that are preconfigured on Incredible PBX. Dial a few of these to get started:

DEMO - Apps Demo
123 - Reminders
947 - Weather by ZIP Code
951 - Yahoo News
TODAY - Today in History
LENNY - The Telemarketer's Worst Nightmare

If you are a Mac user, another great no-frills softphone is Telephone. Just download and install it from the Mac App Store. For Android users, check out the terrific new VitalPBX Communicator. Works flawlessly with Incredible PBX.

Audio Issues with Incredible PBX 16-15

If you experience one-way or no audio on some calls, add your external IP address and LAN subnet in the GUI by navigating to Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. In the NAT Settings section, click Detect Network Settings. Click Submit and Apply Settings to save your changes.

Incredible PBX 16-15 Administration

We’ve eased the pain of administering your new PBX with a collection of scripts which you will find in the /root folder after logging in with SSH or Putty. Here’s a quick summary of what each of the scripts does.

add-fqdn is used to whitelist a fully-qualified domain name in the firewall. Because Incredible PBX 16-15 blocks all traffic from IP addresses that are not whitelisted, this is what you use to authorize an external user for your PBX. The advantage of an FQDN is that you can use a dynamic DNS service to automatically update the IP address associated with an FQDN so that you never lose connectivity.

add-ip is used to whitelist a public IP address in the firewall. See the add-fqdn explanation as to why this matters.

del-acct is used to remove an IP address or FQDN from the firewall’s whitelist.

admin-pw-change is used to set the admin password for access to the FreePBX/Incredible PBX web GUI using a browser pointed to the local IP address of your server.

apache-pw-change is used to set the admin password for access to Apache/Incredible PBX apps including AsteriDex and Reminders. This provides a password layer of protection for access to these applications.

reset-conference-pins is a script that automatically and randomly resets the user and admin pins for access to the preconfigured conferencing application. Dial C-O-N-F from any registered SIP phone to connect to the conference.

reset-extension-passwords is a script that automatically and randomly resets ALL of the SIP passwords for extensions 701-705. Be careful using this one, or you may disable existing registered phones and cause Fail2Ban to blacklist the IP addresses of those users. HINT: You can place a call to the Ring Group associated with all five extensions by dialing 777.

reset-reminders-pin is a script that automatically and randomly resets the pin required to access the Telephone Reminders application by dialing 123. It’s important to protect this application because a nefarious user could set up a reminder to call a number anywhere in the world assuming your SIP provider’s account was configured to allow such calls.

show-feature-codes is a cheat sheet for all of the feature codes which can be dialed from any registered SIP phone. It documents how powerful a platform Incredible PBX 16-15 actually is. A similar listing is available in the GUI at Admin -> Feature Codes.

show-passwords is a script that displays most of the passwords associated with Incredible PBX 16-15. This includes SIP extension passwords, voicemail pins, conference pins, telephone reminders pin, and your Anveo Direct outbound calling pin (if configured). Note that voicemail pins are configured by the user of a SIP extension the first time the user accesses the voicemail system by dialing *97.

update-IncrediblePBX is the Automatic Update Utility which checks for server updates from incrediblepbx.com every time you log into your server as root using SSH or Putty. Do NOT disable it as it is used to load important fixes and security updates when necessary. We recommend logging into your server at least once a week.

pbxstatus (shown above) displays status of all major components of Incredible PBX 16-15.

Forwarding Calls to Your Cellphone. Keep in mind that inbound calls to your DIDs automatically ring all five SIP extensions, 701-705. The easiest way to also ring your cellphone is to set one of these five extensions to forward incoming calls to your cellphone. After logging into your PBX as root, issue the following command to forward calls from extension 705 to your cellphone: asterisk -rx "database put CF 705 6781234567"

To remove call forwarding: asterisk -rx "database del CF 705"

Configuring SendMail with Incredible PBX 16-15

In order to receive voicemails by email delivery, outbound mail functionality from your server obviously is required. If you’ve deployed your server in your home, your Internet Service Provider probably blocks downstream mail servers such as Incredible PBX from sending mail. This is done to reduce SPAM. In this case, you will need to configure SendMail using either your ISP or Gmail as an SMTP Relay Host. Here are the steps using a Gmail account:

cd /etc/mail
yum -y install sendmail-cf
hostname -f > genericsdomain
touch genericstable
cd /usr/bin
rm -f makemap
ln -s ../sbin/makemap.sendmail makemap
cd /etc/mail
makemap -r hash genericstable.db < genericstable
mv sendmail.mc sendmail.mc.original
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/sendmail.mc.gmail
cp sendmail.mc.gmail sendmail.mc
mkdir -p auth
chmod 700 auth
cd auth
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" > client-info
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:587 \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" >> client-info
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:465 \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" >> client-info
# Stop here and edit client-info (nano -w client-info) in all three lines.
# Replace  user_id with your gMail account name without @gmail.com
# Replace password with your real gMail password OR
#  use your Gmail App Key if 2-step verification is enabled
# Be sure to replace the double-quotes shown above if they don't appear in the file!!!
# Save your changes (Ctrl-X, Y, then Enter)
chmod 600 client-info
makemap -r hash client-info.db < client-info
cd ..
make
systemctl restart sendmail

If your server is hosted in the cloud and your provider does not block TCP port 25, then you can send mail without using a SmartHost; however, your server's hostname must actually be real or downstream mail servers will reject your mail. You can set your server's hostname like this: hostname myserver.myhost.com. This is usually sufficient; however, it's a good idea to also add the hostname in /etc/hostname and in /etc/hosts as the first entry on 127.0.0.1 line:

127.0.0.1   myserver.myhost.com pbx.local localhost localhost.localdomain

Next, test outbound mail using this command with your actual email address:

echo "test" | mail -s testmessage yourname@youremaildomain.com

Once you are sure your emails are being delivered reliably, here's a sample GUI voicemail configuration for an extension:


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Getting Started with Incredible Fax 16

Believe it or not, there still are lots of folks that use faxes in their everyday lives. If you're one of them, Incredible PBX has your back. Begin by logging into your server as root and running incrediblefax16.sh to install HylaFax and AvantFax on your server. You'll be prompted a dozen or more times for information. Answer no to the secure fax question. For the rest of the prompts, just press ENTER to accept the default entries. Rebooting your server is required when the install finishes. Once your server is back on line, there will be a new AvantFax tab in the GUI. Before proceeding, be sure to set an Apache web apps password by running /root/apache-pw-change. Next, login to AvantFax with your browser. You first will be prompted for your Apache credentials. Enter admin for the username and whatever password you set up in the previous step. Then you will be prompted for your AvantFax credentials. The default is admin:password. After you enter the username and password, you will be prompted to change your admin password. The old password is still password. Then enter your desired password twice and save the setting. The AvantFax dashboard then will display. If nothing has come unglued, you should see four green Idle icons:


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You can Send Faxes from within AvantFax by choosing the Send Fax tab, or you can use one of many HylaFax clients. Google is your friend.

Receiving faxes currently has issues not the least of which are fax detection being broken and incoming faxes never reaching the specified destination. We will continue to work on this and provide updates when they become available. For the time being, the simple workaround if you're using Skyetel as your provider is to designate a DID as a fax line (Call Routing: vFax) in the Skyetel Dashboard. Then Skyetel will manage the incoming faxes without any additional configuration on your PBX. You still can send faxes from within the AvantFax GUI.

Getting Started with ODBC for Asterisk

If you're new to the ODBC World, here's a quick primer. The idea behind Open Data Base Connectivity is to simplify the task of connecting up any flavor database management system so that it can talk to applications and foreign databases without having to write custom code to support every different DBMS. ODBC serves in much the same way as a translator who sits between you and foreign visitors. With the benefit of a translator, whatever is spoken is understood on both ends of the conversation. The real beauty of ODBC is that it is conversant with almost every DBMS offering on the planet including Oracle, Informix, SAS, MS Access, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Sybase, and even dBase, FoxPro, and XDB. All you really need is the ODBC connector for your operating system plus one or more database drivers for the DBMS data sources you wish to use.

Because the FreePBX modules are driven by MySQL tables, we've included the MySQL connector for Asterisk in Incredible PBX 16-15 together with two sample applications to get you started. If you add your own MySQL databases, it's easy to connect them with ODBC by simply running the odbc-gen.sh script in /root again. The two sample applications we've included will show you how to integrate ODBC queries into your Asterisk dialplan. The code is available in odbc.conf in the /etc/asterisk folder. The first sample is a typical employee database. By dialing 222, you will be prompted to enter the employee number (12345), and the ODBC app then will look up the employee number and read you the name of the employee. The second sample is a speed dialer using the AsteriDex database. The sample entries in the database include a 3-numeric-digit DIALCODE which simply matches the first three letters of each AsteriDex name spelled out on a phone, e.g. 335 = DELta Airlines and 263 = AMErican Airlines. As you add new entries to AsteriDex, you can add dialcodes in the same way or in any other scheme you prefer. Once you have signed up with a provider so that you can make outbound calls, just dial 223 and enter the AsteriDex dialcode to place the call. Think of it as a Speed Dialer on Steroids.

Beginning the Incredible PBX 13-13 Migration

For anyone that's been involved with Asterisk and FreePBX, you already know what a pain it was to move from one release to another. It's still not quite automatic, but it's damn close. You can't perform an in-place migration to move from Asterisk 13 and FreePBX 13 to Asterisk 16 with FreePBX 15. So you'll need to first bring up an Incredible PBX 16-15.2 platform as documented above. It must be separate and apart from your already functioning Incredible PBX 13-13.10 server. Once you've done that, use add-ip to whitelist the IP address of your 13-13 server on the 16-15 PBX and whitelist the IP address of your 16-15 server on the 13-13 PBX. This will make it easy to copy files between the two servers.

In addition to the whitelisting procedure above, there are three more steps to complete on the Incredible PBX 13-13 server. First, you'll need to update the backup module:

cd /root
./gpl-install-fpbx backup

Next, login to the GUI as admin using a browser and make a backup of your FreePBX components. Access Admin -> Backup & Restore and click Backup Wizard. Give the backup a name and description: incrediblepbx. Choose to run the backup Monthly. Choose Yes for voicemails, recordings, and CDR data. Choose Email Notifications and enter your email address. For Remote Save, choose No. Your backup will be saved locally in /var/spool/asterisk/backup/incrediblepbx. Click Finish.

Click the Pencil icon under incrediblepbx Actions to edit the files to be backed up. Using the + icon, make your Items list look like the following:

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Click Save & Run button when you've made the necessary changes to kick off the backup. Unless you want monthly backups, you can click the trashcan icon under incrediblepbx Actions to remove the task we just created once the backup completes.

Copy the backup file from /var/spool/asterisk/backup/incrediblepbx to your desktop PC.

Restoring Your Data to Incredible PBX 16-15

Now let's continue on the Incredible PBX 16-15.2 server. Login to the GUI as admin using your favorite browser. From the FreePBX Dashboard, choose Admin -> Backup & Restore. Click the Restore tab. Click on Upload a Backup File and choose the backup file from your desktop. Once the backup is loaded, click Restore with CDR Data button to begin. When the whirring stops, there may be an error message. Just ignore it. Return to the Dashboard. Clear the warning about Bind Ports. It's incorrect. Your setup was copied correctly with chan_SIP on UDP 5060 and PJsip on UDP 5061 (unless you changed them). You now can use your browser to review your setup and verify that your 13-13 data came over correctly. Finally, verify that voicemail settings for your extensions got properly configured, and you should be good to go with Incredible PBX 16-15. Enjoy!

Where To Go From Here

Complete documentation on the FreePBX GPL Modules is available here.

Complete documentation on the Incredible PBX additions is available here.

An introduction to configuring extensions, trunks, and routes is available here.

Originally published: Monday, September 16, 2019


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Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

blankBOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

blankThe lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

blankVitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

blankSpecial Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



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Sangoma Merging Proprietary Code Cripples GPL Module

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What some of us feared with Sangoma’s acquisition of Asterisk® and FreePBX® is now coming to pass with the departure of almost the entire previous FreePBX development team. New Sangoma staff are "fixing" outstanding FreePBX software bugs in GPL code by merging in proprietary, non-GPL code. In addition to violating the spirit of the GPL,1 it also has immediate consequences for those using Linux platforms other than CentOS since the proprietary code and Zend Guard won’t run under Debian, Ubuntu, or Raspbian.

This issue first appeared when voicemails were not restored using the new Backup & Restore module for FreePBX 15. The module itself had almost two man-years of programming time invested in it, and the beauty of the module as we have previously noted was that it allowed transparent migration of a FreePBX 13 platform to FreePBX 15. At least that was the theory. Unfortunately, there still are some minor bugs which were reported in several issues on the FreePBX Bug Tracker including this one.

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In addressing the identified bug, the Sangoma solution required installation of the commercial SysAdmin module which had two major shortcomings: (1) it required non-GPL code to use the new Backup & Restore module and (2) the Backup & Restore module would no longer run on any platform other than the proprietary RHEL-based FreePBX Distro. Thus, while the Backup & Restore component continues to be advertised as a GPLv3 module, it now is actually commercial because of its SysAdmin dependency.

What’s particularly disappointing about this issue’s resolution is that the voicemail recordings which were not being restored do actually exist in the backup files created by the Backup & Restore module. So the simple bug fix was the addition of a single line of code to restore the data, if any, in the backup:

tar zxvf $BACKUP ./var/spool/asterisk/voicemail -C /

Instead, what was proffered was a hack that forced users to migrate to a commercial platform. Whether intended or not, this sort of monetizing scenario is exactly what we feared when Sangoma acquired Asterisk and FreePBX. We hope you will join us in voicing your concern. This is not the way to be a good steward of an open source project.

Originally published: Monday, September 2, 2019


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Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

blankBOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

blankThe lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

blankVitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

blankSpecial Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



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  1. One of the major shortcomings of the GPL is that it’s a toothless tiger when it comes to GPL infractions by the actual copyright holder of the code. There is no enforcement mechanism when the copyright owner himself breaches the terms of the GPL. []

Migrating Painlessly from Incredible PBX 13-13 to 16-15

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Asterisk® 13 will be 6 years old this October. That’s like three lifetimes in VoIP years. So let’s face it. It’s time to start making plans to move on up. The latest LTS version is Asterisk 16 which gets you another 4+ years with security fixes. We won’t dwell on the shortcomings of PJsip in Asterisk 13 and the fact that chanSIP is getting long in the tooth. So the sooner you migrate the better off you will be. Thanks to the latest FreePBX® 15 Backup & Restore module and some great tips from @DavidFoxworth and @Kenn10 on the PIAF Forum, 16-15 migration should be painless. We’re a little late with this week’s article because we wanted to finish the script to also let you migrate your Call Detail Records as well. Now it’s soup.

If you’re just getting started with Incredible PBX® 16-15 then you’ll get all of today’s additions as part of your initial install. Just follow our this tutorial. If you want to deploy Incredible PBX 16-15 as a public server on the Internet, this tutorial will walk you through that upgrade.

Beginning the Incredible PBX 13-13 Migration

For anyone that’s been involved with Asterisk and FreePBX, you already know what a pain it was to move from one release to another. It’s still not quite automatic, but it’s damn close. You can’t perform an in-place migration to move from Asterisk 13 and FreePBX 13 to Asteerisk 16 with FreePBX 15. So you’ll need to first bring up an Incredible PBX 16-15.1 platform that is separate and apart from your already functioning Incredible PBX 13-13.10 server. Once you’ve done that, use add-ip to whitelist the IP address of your 13-13 server on the 16-15 PBX and whitelist the IP address of your 16-15 server on the 13-13 PBX. This will make it easy to copy files between the two servers.

In addition to the whitelisting procedure above, there are three more steps to complete on the Incredible PBX 13-13 server. First, you’ll need to update the backup module:

cd /root
./gpl-install-fpbx backup

Next, login to the GUI as admin using a browser and make a backup of your FreePBX components. Access Admin -> Backup & Restore and click Backup Wizard. Give the backup a name and description: incrediblepbx. Choose to run the backup Monthly. Choose Yes for voicemails, recordings, and CDR data. Choose Email Notifications and enter your email address. For Remote Save, choose No. Your backup will be saved locally in /var/spool/asterisk/backup/incrediblepbx. Click Finish.

Click the Pencil icon under incrediblepbx Actions to edit the files to be backed up. Using the + icon, make your Items list look like the following:

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Click Save & Run button when you’ve made the necessary changes to kick off the backup. Unless you want monthly backups, you can click the trashcan icon under incrediblepbx Actions to remove the task we just created once the backup completes.

Copy the backup file from /var/spool/asterisk/backup/incrediblepbx to your desktop PC.

Finally, let’s back up your Call Detail Records (cdr/cel) which won’t get imported with the FreePBX 15 restore utility. Log in to the Linux CLI as root and issue the following commands to create the CDR backup and copy it to your 16-15 server. Replace the xx’s with the IP address of your 16-15 server.

cd /root
mysqldump -u root -ppassw0rd --single-transaction --quick \\ 
 --lock-tables=false asteriskcdrdb > asteriskcdr1313.sql
gzip asteriskcdr1313.sql
scp asteriskcdr1313.sql.gz root@xx.xx.xx.xx:/root/asteriskcdr1313.sql.gz

Restoring Your Data to Incredible PBX 16-15

Let’s begin on the Incredible PBX 16-15 server by logging into the Linux CLI as root. Issue the following commands to set up your server platform for the Incredible PBX 13-13 import. Unless you have just installed Incredible PBX 16-15 since 3 p.m. EDT today, be sure to perform all of the steps below. It won’t hurt to do it again just to be sure you have the latest and greatest code:

cd /root
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/newbackup16-15.tar.gz
tar zxvf newbackup16-15.tar.gz
rm -f newbackup16-15.tar.gz
./install-backup

Next, login to the GUI as admin using your favorite browser. The new FreePBX 15 backup module is still a little rough around the edges, but it will get the job done. And that’s what matters. From the FreePBX Dashboard, choose Admin -> Backup & Restore. Be prepared. It will blow up. Not to worry. Click the Back button on your browser once or twice to return to the FreePBX Dashboard. Now repeat the drill: Admin -> Backup & Restore. This time it will work. Now click the Restore tab. Click on Upload a Backup File and choose the backup file from your desktop. Once the backup is loaded, click RunRestore button to begin. When the whirring stops, there will be an error message. Ignore it. Don’t click anything just yet. Instead, drop down to the Linux CLI again and run: /root/restore-fix.

When it completes, return to the GUI and your browser, close the Restore dialog, and return to the Dashboard. Ignore the warning about Bind Ports. Click Settings->SIP Settings->SIP Settings (pj_sip) and scroll down to UDP. Click YES then Submit then Apply Config. We’re almost finished.

Return to the Linux CLI and run: /root/import-cdr1313 to import your 13-13 cdr and cel data. This will overwrite existing CDR data on your 16-15 server. If anyone needs to get it back, we’ll add the steps below in coming days. Stay tuned.

Known Issues with Incredible PBX 13-13 Imports

You now can use your browser to review your setup and verify that your 13-13 data came over. If you’re using CallerID Superfecta, you’ll need to enable it under Admin -> CID Superfecta. Next, access Applications -> Misc Applications and set the extension for Demo IVR to 3366. Save your settings and reload the dialplan when prompted. Be advised that Custom Destinations currently do not populate so you’ll need to cut-and-paste your entries from your 13-13 server. There should only be a few: Fax (HylaFax), Time of Day, and perhaps OutAnyWhere. OSS EndPoint Manager is not compatible with FreePBX 15 and will not be restored. Finally, verify that voicemail settings for your extensions got properly set. You may need to again enable voicemail, set a VM password, and configure email delivery of voicemails, if desired.

FIXED: Importing Ring Groups from 13-13 caused calls to fail unless Send Progress was set to No for each of the ring groups. This is no longer necessary. Voicemail data did not get restored properly. This has been fixed by running restore-fix script.

Managing CDR Data with Incredible PBX 16-15

Call Detail Records are stored in two tables in MySQL’s asteriskcdrdb database. Unlike in FreePBX 13, FreePBX 15 uses the InnoDB storage engine and a number of new fields in the cdr table so don’t attempt to merely restore your FreePBX 13 asteriskcdrdb database to FreePBX 15, or you will get a royal mess. Our conversion utility, import-cdr1313, makes it easy to migrate the data as explained above. What we didn’t do was restore any existing CDR data you may have already accumulated on your 16-15 server. But we did make a backup of the data which is stored in asteriskcdr1615new.sql. You can use this backup for two purposes. You can replace the CDR 13-13 data that we just imported with your original 16-15 data, or you can add your previous CDR 16-15 data to the 13-13 data. As stored, asteriskcdr1615new.sql will completely replace the existing contents of the asteriskcdrdb database using the command:

mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asteriskcdrdb < asteriskcdr1615new.sql

If you want to supplement the 13-13 CDR data that was imported with your previous 16-15 CDR data, it's a bit more complex. Begin by making a couple copies of the backup file and then we'll edit one of the new files:

cp asteriskcdr1615new.sql asteriskcdr1615bak.sql
cp asteriskcdr1615new.sql asteriskcdr1615supp.sql
nano -w asteriskcdr1615supp.sql

We need to delete two sections from the file. First, scroll down to Table structure for table `cdr`. Press Ctrl-K to cut (delete) every line until you reach Dumping data for table `cdr`. Second, scroll down further to Table structure for table `cel`. Press Ctrl-K to cut (delete) every line until you reach Dumping data for table `cel`. Now Save the modified file: Ctrl-X, Y, then ENTER. You now can append your previous 16-15 CDR data to the current CDR database with the following command:

mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asteriskcdrdb < asteriskcdr1615supp.sql

We're all human and sometimes mistakes are made. Not to worry. You can put Humpty back together again by starting with your original CDR database, adding the 13-13 CDR data again, and then supplementing it with your previous 16-15 data. Here's how.

mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asteriskcdrdb < asteriskcdr1615bak.sql
./import-cdr1313
cp asteriskcdr1615new.sql asteriskcdr1615supp.sql
# make required changes described above to asteriskcdr1615supp.sql
mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asteriskcdrdb < asteriskcdr1615supp.sql

Two other tips, and you'll be a CDR database expert. First, you can restore an empty (but functional) CDR database with this command:

mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asteriskcdrdb < asteriskcdrdb.sql

Finally, you can make a backup of your existing CDR database at any time with the command:

mysqldump -u root -ppassw0rd --single-transaction --quick \\
 --lock-tables=false asteriskcdrdb > asteriskcdr1615latest.sql

Originally published: Monday, July 29, 2019


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Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

blankBOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

blankThe lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

blankVitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

blankSpecial Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



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Deploying an Incredible PBX 16-15 Public Server with Skyetel

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Safely deploying a public-facing Asterisk® server with full FreePBX® functionality has become the Holy Grail for Nerd Vittles in 2019. Today we tackle it on our new Incredible PBX® 16-15 platform featuring the latest releases of Asterisk 16 and FreePBX 15. The icing on today’s cake is a terrific new offer from Skyetel that supplements the current Nerd Vittles BOGO offer of up to $500 in half-priced VoIP services. Beginning today, Skyetel also will start you off with a $10 credit just for opening an account here. Then, after you have had an opportunity to kick the tires and perhaps purchase a DID for a buck, you can make $9 worth of phone calls before deciding whether to take advantage of the BOGO special by making a purchase of up to $250 and having Skyetel match your contribution. Once you have funded your account, you then can also take advantage of Skyetel’s free number porting offer for the next 60 days. To get your $10 credit, just open a ticket and request the $10 Nerd Vittles credit once you’ve signed up. To get the Nerd Vittles BOGO price match and take advantage of free number porting, simply open another ticket once you have added up to $250 to your account. Effective 10/1/2023, $25/month minimum spend required.

Making the Case for a Public-Facing PBX

We’ve had some of our pioneers trying out the new Incredible PBX 16-15-PUBLIC implementation this past week, and the question arose as to why anyone would want to do this. After all, PBX in a Flash 3 and Incredible PBX for the better part of a decade have been deployed with a whitelist using the Travelin’ Man 3 firewall, and there’s never been a security issue. So why switch horses now? The short answer is mobile users with dynamic IP addresses. If all the users of your PBX are sitting behind the same NAT-based router with static IP addresses, the Travelin’ Man 3 design is perfect. The bad guys could never even see your server. But if some of your users either reside or travel outside your home base or if you want calls to follow you on your smartphone when you leave home or the office, then Travelin’ Man 3 blocked SIP access from these remote phones until their new IP addresses were whitelisted. Multiply this by dozens or hundreds of users, and network management suddenly became a full-time job. Yes, we’ve had tools such as dynamic DNS and PortKnocker to ease the pain, but it still was a knuckle-drill for mobile users. And, in today’s world, much of the workforce is quickly morphing into mobile users without a traditional desk at an office.

The world also is becoming more SIP savvy. Just as folks are learning that a $35 antenna can provide an awesome collection of 4K Ultra HD TV channels without the expense of a monthly cable bill, others are learning that a SIP telephone or softphone app on your smartphone can provide free calls to and from anybody with a SIP URI without sharing your communications with Facebook or Microsoft. Today’s PUBLIC PBX makes free worldwide SIP calling a reality.

Building the Base Platform for Incredible PBX PUBLIC

To get started today, you need to begin by installing Incredible PBX 16-15 using the latest tutorial. There still are a few bugs in the FreePBX 15 fax module so you won’t be able to successfully install and use Incredible Fax for the time being. We’ll let everyone know when the issues have been resolved.

Once you have set up your Incredible PBX 16-15.2 server, the next step is to assign one or two fully-qualified domain names (FQDNs) to your server. You can have one FQDN for registering SIP extensions and a different one for anonymous SIP (invites) access to your server, or you can use the same FQDN for both. Security through obscurity provides an extra layer of protection for your server so choose your FQDNs carefully. sip.yourname.com provides almost no protection while f246g.yourname.com pretty much assures that nobody is going to guess your domain name. This is particularly important with the FQDN for SIP registrations because registered extensions on your PBX can obviously make phone calls that cost money.

By default, Incredible PBX 16-15 configures five extensions (701-705) and a Ring Group for those extensions (777) as well as four trunks including Skyetel. It’s ready to make and receive calls as soon as you sign up with one of the four providers listed in the tutorial. You can add as many additional providers and extensions as you like and modify the ring group to meet your needs. To get started, be sure to configure the correct time zone for your server as this affects delivery of reminders. Run /root/timezone-setup. Next, set a secure password for admin access to the FreePBX GUI modules. Run /root/admin-pw-change. Then set a secure password for admin access to web applications such as AsteriDex, Reminders, and User Control Panel. Run /root/apache-pw-change. In addition to reviewing your extensions and ring group, review the default inbound route and choose the destination for the incoming calls from your provider. Finally, configure the outbound route to use the provider sequence desired. By default, it uses Skyetel for outbound calls.

Going Public with Incredible PBX 16-15

Once you’ve tested making and receiving calls with your new server, you’re ready to convert it into a public-facing PBX. In order to run the install script below, you’ll need your FQDNs that you chose above, plus a port number for future SSH/Putty access to your server, plus a list of the extensions you wish to make available for public access to your PBX. These whitelisted extensions can be reached via SIP URI from anywhere in the world by anybody. It works just like your old MaBell phone. Anybody, anywhere can dial your number. What’s changed is now the calls are free. So choose your list carefully. We recommend using the year you were born for your SSH port to keep things simple for you. Once the GO-PUBLIC-16-15 script has been run, you can only access your PBX via SSH/Putty at the new port, e.g. SSH -p 1990 root@yourFQDN.com

Now we’re ready to run the install script. It takes less than a minute. Before you begin, log out of ALL SIP extensions you have previously registered with Incredible PBX and change the server destination from an IP address to the FQDN you plan to assign to SIP registrations. Otherwise, these IP addresses will get banned while the install script is running below!

cd /root
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/go-public-16-15.tar.gz
tar zxvf go-public-16-15.tar.gz
rm -f go-public-16-15.tar.gz
./GO-PUBLIC-16-15

A Few Words About Incredible PBX PUBLIC Security

As with all Incredible PBX servers, Incredible PBX 16-15-PUBLIC includes the Automatic Update Utility. Please don’t disable it. It’s our only way to push updates to you if some vulnerability is discovered down the road. It gets run whenever you login to your server as root using SSH/Putty. Do so regularly and follow us on Twitter for security alerts. There’s also an Incredible PBX RSS Feed that is displayed when you login to the Incredible PBX GUI with a browser. It, too, includes security alerts and should be checked regularly. It’s your phone bill.

Incredible PBX 16-15-PUBLIC uses the ipset utility in conjunction with the IPtables firewall to block several countries that have inordinately high concentrations of folks that try to break into VoIP servers. In addition, your public PBX includes the VoIP Blacklist which includes another 100,000 bad guys from around the globe. These blacklists get updated every night by a script which is run from /etc/crontab. For your own safety, don’t disable or delete /etc/update-voipbl.sh or the other components upon which it relies.

Here are some other things you should do regularly to assure that your server remains secure. Login via SSH/Putty as root and check pbxstatus after the Automatic Update Utility is run. With the exception of the fax components, all the other items should be green all the time. From the Linux CLI, run: iptables -nL. This will show your firewall rules and whether any IP addresses have been banned by Fail2Ban. If there are banned IP addresses that are not your own, please open a thread on the PIAF Forum and let us know about it. If there are dozens of banned IP addresses, shutdown your server immediately until the problem is identified and resolved. If the IP addresses happen to be your own users because of using incorrect passwords or because of using a server IP address instead of its FQDN for SIP registrations, unban the IP address: fail2ban-client set asterisk unbanip xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Finally, watch the Asterisk CLI periodically for abnormal activity: asterisk -rvvvvvvvvvv

Tightening Up SSH Server Access

You obviously need a very secure root password for access to your server using SSH/Putty. Changing the TCP port for SSH access avoids the script kiddies, but it doesn’t offer much protection from a determined cracker. SSH login attempts are monitored by Fail2Ban, but Fail2Ban has issues when a determined intruder is using a powerful computing platform such as Amazon EC2. The more prudent solution is to disable SSH port access and use SSH Public Key Authentication as documented in the linked tutorial. Always, always use ssh-copy-id to copy your credentials to more than one desktop machine so that you don’t inadvertently lock yourself out of your PBX in the case of a hardware failure.

Introducing the VitalPBX Communicator

Our previous article offered some suggestions for SIP softphones. These become more important once you deploy a public-facing PBX and want to stay connected while you’re away from home or the office. If you’re using an Android smartphone even without a SIM card and provider, there is no finer softphone than the new VitalPBX Communicator. Using the Account Assistant, enter the SIP extension of your PBX as the Username. Enter the SIP extension password as the Password. For the Domain, enter the SIP registration FQDN you specified above (not the IP address of your server!). Choose UDP for the Transport. And click Login to begin. In the Network Settings, turn OFF WiFi only. If you enable Background Mode and Start At Boot Time in Advanced Settings, the softphone will remain registered and available even when you’re using other applications. On a Google Pixel 3, this consumes about 20% of the phone’s battery life from a full charge. A similar app is available for Windows-based PCs. An iPhone app is under development.

For other platforms, the Linphone application is an excellent alternative. See our previous Linphone tutorial for details. Here are the download links for each supported platform:

A Word to the Wise. Our experience suggests that SIP communications with an iPhone is notoriously awful. Under identical conditions using the same application on both an iPhone and an Android phone typically results in calls failing or experiencing one-way or no audio on the iPhone. Save yourself some frustration and purchase ANY Android phone for SIP communications (HINT: With the exception of the camera, the Moto g6 is virtually identical in shape and performance to Google’s Pixel 3 at less than one-third the cost). As noted, no SIM card is required. WiFi works perfectly. If you want a cell phone provider, check out Mint Mobile’s dirt cheap offering ($15/mo. for unlimited calls and text plus 3GB of LTE data). Nerd Vittles (and you) receive a perk when you use our link to sign up for service.

Special Thanks: We want to give an extra special tip of the hat to the PIAF Forum members who assisted in working the kinks out of the last two weeks’ Incredible PBX 16-15 offerings. We also wish to thank JavaPipe LLC for a number of DDOS tips and tricks in securing CentOS 7 with IPtables.

Originally published: Monday, July 22, 2019


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Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

blankBOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

blankThe lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

blankVitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

blankSpecial Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



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Enchilada Amore: It’s Incredible PBX 16-15 for CentOS 7

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Just when you thought the VoIP community was running out of open source offerings, along comes last week’s Incredible PBX 16® LITE and today’s Incredible PBX 16-15 for CentOS® 7 featuring the same great feature set as the LITE version including Asterisk 16®. And now you also get the entire FreePBX® 15 GPL module collection including their new User Control Panel (UCP) and a much enhanced web GUI plus the entire Incredible PBX feature set. As with Incredible PBX LITE, it’s plug-and-play with immediate calling capability using any of four commercial SIP providers. Or you can choose one of 16 other preconfigured SIP providers, enter your credentials, and enjoy instant connectivity without worrying about SIP settings. We began the Incredible PBX 16 adventure last week. Let’s catch you up if you’re just joining.

UPDATE: A new release of Incredible PBX 16-15 is now available here. It resolves most issues with migration from Incredible PBX 13-13.

UPDATE: Turn your Incredible PBX 16-15 server into a secure public-facing PBX. Here’s how.

What’s Included? Incredible PBX 16-15 serves up a VoIP powerhouse featuring Asterisk 16, the FreePBX 15 GPL platform including User Control Panel (UCP), an Apache web server, the latest MariaDB SQL server (formerly MySQL), SendMail, and the Incredible PBX feature set including SIP, SMS, Opus, voice recognition, PicoTTS Text-to-Speech VoIP applications plus fax support, Click-to-Dial, News, Weather, Reminders, ODBC, and hundreds of features that typically are found in commercial PBXs: Conferencing, IVRs and AutoAttendants, Email Delivery of Voicemail, and much more.

Choosing a SIP Provider. Incredible PBX 16-15 comes preconfigured with support for five SIP extensions and four of the major SIP providers: Skyetel, VoIP.ms, V1VoIP, and Anveo Direct. We obviously hope you’ll choose Skyetel not only because they financially support Nerd Vittles and our open source projects, but also because it is a clearly superior platform offering crystal-clear communications and triple-redundancy so you never miss a call. Skyetel also sets itself apart from the other providers in the support department. They actually respond to issues, and there’s never a charge. As the old saying goes, they may not be the cheapest, but you get what you pay for. Even without taking advantage of Nerd Vittles half-price offer on up to $500 of Skyetel services, they’re still dirt cheap compared to the Bell Sisters and cable companies. Traditional DIDs are $1 per month. Outbound conversational calls are $0.012 per minute. Incoming conversational calls are a penny a minute, and CallerID lookups are $0.004. With all four providers, you only pay for minutes you use. Using more than one is a good idea.

Choosing a Platform for Incredible PBX 16-15

As with our other open source offerings, the platform choice for Incredible PBX 16-15 depends upon a number of factors. For most folks, you’d be crazy to go out and purchase hardware to use in your home or office when cloud-based platforms are available for about a dollar a month. Unless you plan to publicly expose your server on the Internet to facilitate remote SIP connections, the OpenVZ offerings below are perfectly adequate while in business with the cautionary note that you need off-site backups AND a tested backup plan. Three providers previously listed have closed their doors in 2019. You’ve been warned.

ProviderRAMDiskBandwidthPerformance as of 12/1/19Cost
CrownCloud KVM (LA)1GB20GB +
Snapshot
1TB/month598Mb/DN 281Mb/UP
2CPU Core
$25/year
Best Buy!
Naranjatech KVM (The Netherlands)1GB20GB1TB/monthHosting since 2005
VAT: EU res.
20€/year w/code:
SBF2019
BudgetNode KVM (LA)1GB40GB RAID101TB/monthAlso available in U.K PM @Ishaq on LET before payment$24/year
FreeRangeCloud KVM (Ashburn VA, Winnipeg, Freemont CA)1GB20GB SSD3TB/monthPick EGG loc'n
Open ticket for last 5GB SSD
$30/year w/code:
LEBEGG30

Installing Incredible PBX 16-15 with CentOS 7

If you’ve installed previous iterations of Incredible PBX, today’s drill is similar. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the install procedure for Incredible PBX 16-15. Begin by installing a minimal CentOS 7 (64-bit) platform or pick the CentOS 7 option with 1GB RAM and 20GB of storage from your cloud provider’s menu of choices. Then log into your server as root and issue the following commands:

passwd
yum -y update
yum -y install net-tools nano wget tar
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx16-15.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf incrediblepbx16-15.1.tar.gz
rm -f incrediblepbx16-15.1.tar.gz
# to add swap file on non-OpenVZ cloud platforms with no swap file
./create-swapfile-DO
# kick off Phase I install
./IncrediblePBX16-15.sh
# after reboot, kick off Phase II install
./IncrediblePBX16-15.sh
# add HylaFax/AvantFax, if desired
./incrediblefax16.sh
# set desired timezone
./timezone-setup
# display your passwords
./show-passwords
# remember to enable TUN/TAP if using VPS Control Panel with OpenVZ
# reconfigure PortKnocker if installing on an OpenVZ platform
echo 'OPTIONS="-i venet0:0"' >> /etc/sysconfig/knockd
service knockd restart
# set up NeoRouter VPN client, if desired
nrclientcmd
# check network speed
wget -O speedtest-cli https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py
chmod +x speedtest-cli
./speedtest-cli

WebMin is also installed and configured as part of the base install. The root password for access is the same as your Linux root password. We strongly recommend that you not use WebMin to make configuration changes to your server. You may inadvertently damage the operation of your PBX beyond repair. WebMin is an excellent tool to LOOK at how your server is configured. When used for that purpose, we highly recommend WebMin as a way to become familiar with your Linux configuration.

Planning Ahead for That Rainy Day

If you haven’t already learned the hard way, let us save you from a future shock. Hardware fails. All of it. So spend an extra hour now so that you’ll be prepared when (not if) disaster strikes. First, once you have your new PBX configured the way you plan to use it, make a backup of your PBX by running the Incredible Backup script: /root/incrediblebackup16

Copy down the name of the backup file that was created. You’ll need it in a few minutes.

Second, build yourself an identical VirtualBox platform on your desktop PC. It’s the same steps as outlined above.

Next, create a /backup folder on your VirtualBox PBX and copy the backup file from your main server to your VirtualBox server and restore it after logging in to VirtualBox PBX as root:

mkdir /backup
scp root@main-pbx-ip-address:/backup/backup-file-name.tar.gz /backup/.
/root/incrediblerestore16 /backup/backup-file-name.tar.gz

Complaints that you "forgot" to make a backup and your hardware has failed or your provider has gone out of business are not welcomed. We’re sorry for your loss. Case closed.

Completing the Incredible PBX Setup Procedure

Unless your desktop PC and server are both on the same private LAN, the install procedure should be performed from a desktop PC using SSH or Putty. This will insure that your desktop PC is also whitelisted in the Incredible PBX firewall. Using the console to perform the install is NOT recommended as your desktop PC will not be whitelisted in the firewall. This may result in your not being able to log in to your server. Once you have network connectivity, log in to your server as root from a desktop PC using your root password. Accept the license agreement by pressing ENTER.

Kick off the Phase I install. Once your server reboots and you log back in as root, start the Phase II install. All of your passwords will be randomly assigned with the exception of the root user Linux password. You can set it at any time by issuing the command: passwd. With the exception of your root user password, the remaining passwords can be displayed using the command: /root/show-passwords.

Finally, if your PBX is sitting behind a NAT-based router, you’ll need to redirect incoming UDP 5060 and UDP 10000-20000 traffic to the private IP address of your PBX. This is required for all of the SIP providers included in the Incredible PBX 16-15 default build. Otherwise, inbound calls will fail.

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Configuring Skyetel for Incredible PBX 16-15

If you’ve decided to go with Skyetel, here’s the drill. Sign up for Skyetel service and take advantage of the Nerd Vittles BOGO special. First, complete the Prequalification Form here. You then will be provided a link to the Skyetel site to complete your registration. Once you have registered on the Skyetel site and your account has been activated, open a support ticket and request the BOGO credit for your account by referencing the Nerd Vittles special offer. Skyetel will match your deposit of up to $250 which gets you up to $500 of helf-price calling. Credit is limited to one per person/company/address/location. Effective 10/1/2023, $25/month minimum spend required.

Skyetel does not use SIP registrations to make connections to your PBX. Instead, Skyetel utilizes Endpoint Groups to identify which servers can communicate with the Skyetel service. An Endpoint Group consists of a Name, an IP address, a UDP or TCP port for the connection, and a numerical Priority for the group. For incoming calls destined to your PBX, DIDs are associated with an Endpoint Group to route the calls to your PBX. For outgoing calls from your PBX, a matching Endpoint Group is required to authorize outbound calls through the Skyetel network. Thus, the first step in configuring the Skyetel side for use with your PBX is to set up an Endpoint Group. Here’s a typical setup for Incredible PBX 16-15:

  • Name: MyPBX
  • Priority: 1
  • IP Address: PBX-Public-IP-Address
  • Port: 5060
  • Protocol: UDP
  • Description: my.incrediblepbx.com

To receive incoming PSTN calls, you’ll need at least one DID. On the Skyetel site, you acquire DIDs under the Phone Numbers tab. You have the option of Porting in Existing Numbers (free for the first 60 days after you sign up for service) or purchasing new ones under the Buy Phone Numbers menu option.

Once you have acquired one or more DIDs, navigate to the Local Numbers or Toll Free Numbers tab and specify the desired SIP Format and Endpoint Group for each DID. Add SMS/MMS and E911 support, if desired. Call Forwarding and Failover are also supported. That completes the VoIP setup on the Skyetel side. System Status is always available here.

Configuring VoIP.ms for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for VoIP.ms service, may we suggest you use our signup link so that Nerd Vittles gets a referral credit for your signup. Once your account is set up, you’ll need to set up a SIP SubAccount and, for Authentication Type, choose Static IP Authentication and enter your Incredible PBX 16-15 server’s public IP address. For Transport, choose UDP. For Device Type, choose Asterisk, IP PBX, Gateway or VoIP Switch. Order a DID in their web panel, and then point the DID to the SubAccount you just created. Be sure to specify atlanta1.voip.ms as the POP from which to receive incoming calls.

Configuring V1VoIP for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for V1VoIP service, sign up on their web site. Then login to your account and order a DID under the DIDs tab. Once the DID has been assigned, choose View DIDs and click on the Forwarding button beside your DID. For Option #1, choose Forward to IP Address/PBX. For the Forwarding Address, enter the public IP address of your server. For the T/O (timeout) value, set it to 2o seconds. Then click the Update button. Under the Termination tab, create a new Endpoint with the public IP address of your server so that you can place outbound calls through V1VoIP.

Configuring Anveo Direct for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for Anveo Direct service, sign up on their web site and then login. After adding funds to your account, purchase a DID under Inbound Service -> Order DID. Next, choose Configure Destination SIP Trunk. Give the Trunk a name. For the Primary SIP URI, enter $[E164]$@server-IP-address. For Call Options, select your new DID from the list. You also must whitelist your public IP address under Outbound Service -> Configure. Create a new Call Termination Trunk and name it to match your server. For Dialing Prefix, choose six alphanumeric characters beginning with a zero. In Authorized IP Addresses, enter the public IP address of your server. Set an appropriate rate cap. We like $0.01 per minute to be safe. Set a concurrent calls limit. We like 2. For the Call Routing Method, choose Least Cost unless you’re feeling extravagant. For Routes/Carriers, choose Standard Routes. Write down your Dialing Prefix and then click the Save button.

Before you can make outbound calls through Anveo Direct from your PBX, you first must configure the Dialing Prefix that you wrote down in the previous step. Log into the GUI as admin using a web browser and edit the Anveo-Out trunk in Connectivity -> Trunks. Click on the custom-Settings tab and replace anveo-pin with your actual Dialing Prefix. Click Submit and Apply Config to complete the setup.

By default, incoming Anveo Direct calls will be processed by the Default inbound route on your PBX. If you wish to redirect incoming Anveo Direct calls using DID-specific inbound routes, then you’ve got a bit more work to do. In addition to creating the inbound route using the 11-digit Anveo Direct DID, enter the following commands after logging into your server as root using SSH/Putty:

cd /etc/asterisk
echo "[from-anveo]" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,1,Ringing" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,n,Goto(from-trunk,\${SIP_HEADER(X-anveo-e164)},1)" >> extensions_custom.conf
asterisk -rx "dialplan reload"

Configuring a Softphone for Incredible PBX 16-15

We’re in the home stretch now. You can connect virtually any kind of telephone to your new PBX. Plain Old Phones require an analog telephone adapter (ATA) which can be a separate board in your computer from a company such as Digium. Or it can be a standalone SIP device such as ObiHai’s OBi100 or OBi110 (if you have a phone line from Ma Bell to hook up as well). SIP phones can be connected directly so long as they have an IP address. These could be hardware devices or software devices such as the YateClient softphone. We’ll start with a free one today so you can begin making calls. You can find dozens of recommendations for hardware-based SIP phones both on Nerd Vittles and the PIAF Forum when you’re ready to get serious about VoIP telephony.

We recommend YateClient which is free. Download it from here. Run YateClient once you’ve installed it and enter the credentials for the 701 extension on Incredible PBX. You can find them by running /root/show-passwords. You’ll need the IP address of your server plus your extension 701 password. In the YateClient, fill in the blanks using the IP address of your Server, 701 for your Username, and whatever Password was assigned to the extension when you installed Incredible PBX. Click OK to save your entries.

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Once you are registered to extension 701, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place some test calls to the numerous apps that are preconfigured on Incredible PBX. Dial a few of these to get started:

DEMO - Apps Demo
123 - Reminders
947 - Weather by ZIP Code
951 - Yahoo News
TODAY - Today in History
LENNY - The Telemarketer's Worst Nightmare

If you are a Mac user, another great no-frills softphone is Telephone. Just download and install it from the Mac App Store. For Android users, check out the terrific new VitalPBX Communicator. Works flawlessly with Incredible PBX.

Audio Issues with Incredible PBX 16-15

Only if you experience one-way or no audio on some calls, add your external IP address and LAN subnet in the GUI by navigating to Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. In the NAT Settings section, click Detect Network Settings. Click Submit and Apply Settings to save your changes.

Incredible PBX 16-15 Administration

We’ve eased the pain of administering your new PBX with a collection of scripts which you will find in the /root folder after logging in with SSH or Putty. Here’s a quick summary of what each of the scripts does.

add-fqdn is used to whitelist a fully-qualified domain name in the firewall. Because Incredible PBX 16-15 blocks all traffic from IP addresses that are not whitelisted, this is what you use to authorize an external user for your PBX. The advantage of an FQDN is that you can use a dynamic DNS service to automatically update the IP address associated with an FQDN so that you never lose connectivity.

add-ip is used to whitelist a public IP address in the firewall. See the add-fqdn explanation as to why this matters.

del-acct is used to remove an IP address or FQDN from the firewall’s whitelist.

reset-conference-pins is a script that automatically and randomly resets the user and admin pins for access to the preconfigured conferencing application. Dial C-O-N-F from any registered SIP phone to connect to the conference.

reset-extension-passwords is a script that automatically and randomly resets ALL of the SIP passwords for extensions 701-705. Be careful using this one, or you may disable existing registered phones and cause Fail2Ban to blacklist the IP addresses of those users. HINT: You can place a call to the Ring Group associated with all five extensions by dialing 777.

reset-reminders-pin is a script that automatically and randomly resets the pin required to access the Telephone Reminders application by dialing 123. It’s important to protect this application because a nefarious user could set up a reminder to call a number anywhere in the world assuming your SIP provider’s account was configured to allow such calls.

show-feature-codes is a cheat sheet for all of the feature codes which can be dialed from any registered SIP phone. It documents how powerful a platform Incredible PBX 16-15 actually is. A similar listing is available in the GUI at Admin -> Feature Codes.

show-passwords is a script that displays ALL of the passwords associated with Incredible PBX 16-15. This includes SIP extension passwords, voicemail pins, conference pins, telephone reminders pin, and your Anveo Direct outbound calling pin (if configured). Note that voicemail pins are configured by the user of a SIP extension the first time the user accesses the voicemail system by dialing *97.

update-IncrediblePBX is the Automatic Update Utility which checks for server updates from incrediblepbx.com every time you log into your server as root using SSH or Putty. Do NOT disable it as it is used to load important fixes and security updates when necessary. We recommend logging into your server at least once a week.

pbxstatus (shown above) displays status of all major components of Incredible PBX 16-15.

Forwarding Calls to Your Cellphone. Keep in mind that inbound calls to your DIDs automatically ring all five SIP extensions, 701-705. The easiest way to also ring your cellphone is to set one of these five extensions to forward incoming calls to your cellphone. After logging into your PBX as root, issue the following command to forward calls from extension 705 to your cellphone: asterisk -rx "database put CF 705 6781234567"

To remove call forwarding: asterisk -rx "database del CF 705"

Configuring SendMail with Incredible PBX 16-15

In order to receive voicemails by email delivery, outbound mail functionality from your server obviously is required. If you’ve deployed your server in your home, your Internet Service Provider probably blocks downstream mail servers such as Incredible PBX from sending mail. This is done to reduce SPAM. In this case, you will need to configure SendMail using either your ISP or Gmail as an SMTP Relay Host. Here are the steps using a Gmail account:

cd /etc/mail
yum -y install sendmail-cf
hostname -f > genericsdomain
touch genericstable
makemap -r hash genericstable.db < genericstable
mv sendmail.mc sendmail.mc.original
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/sendmail.mc.gmail
cp sendmail.mc.gmail sendmail.mc
mkdir -p auth
chmod 700 auth
cd auth
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" > client-info
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:587 \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" >> client-info
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:465 \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" >> client-info
# Stop here and edit client-info (nano -w client-info) in all three lines.
# Replace  user_id with your gMail account name without @gmail.com
# Replace password with your real gMail password
# Be sure to replace the double-quotes shown above if they don't appear in the file!!!
# Save your changes (Ctrl-X, Y, then Enter)
chmod 600 client-info
makemap -r hash client-info.db < client-info
cd ..
make
systemctl restart sendmail

If your server is hosted in the cloud and your provider does not block TCP port 25, then you can send mail without using a SmartHost; however, your server's hostname must actually be real or downstream mail servers will reject your mail. You can set your server's hostname like this: hostname myserver.myhost.com. This is usually sufficient; however, it's a good idea to also add the hostname in /etc/hostname and in /etc/hosts as the first entry on 127.0.0.1 line:

127.0.0.1   myserver.myhost.com pbx.local localhost localhost.localdomain

Next, test outbound mail using this command with your actual email address:

echo "test" | mail -s testmessage yourname@youremaildomain.com

Once you are sure your emails are being delivered reliably, here's a sample GUI voicemail configuration for an extension:


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Getting Started with Incredible Fax 16

Believe it or not, there still are lots of folks that use faxes in their everyday lives. If you're one of them, Incredible PBX has your back. Begin by logging into your server as root and running incrediblefax16.sh to install HylaFax and AvantFax on your server. You'll be prompted a dozen or more times for information. Answer no to the secure fax question. For the rest of the prompts, just press ENTER to accept the default entries. Rebooting your server is required when the install finishes. Once your server is back on line, there will be a new AvantFax tab in the GUI. Before proceeding, be sure to set an Apache web apps password by running /root/apache-pw-change. Next, login to AvantFax with your browser. You first will be prompted for your Apache credentials. Enter admin for the username and whatever password you set up in the previous step. Then you will be prompted for your AvantFax credentials. The default is admin:password. After you enter the username and password, you will be prompted to change your admin password. The old password is still password. Then enter your desired password twice and save the setting. The AvantFax dashboard then will display. If nothing has come unglued, you should see four green Idle icons:


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You can Send Faxes from within AvantFax by choosing the Send Fax tab, or you can use one of many HylaFax clients. Google is your friend.

Receiving faxes currently has issues not the least of which are fax detection being broken and incoming faxes never reaching the specified destination. We will continue to work on this and provide updates when they become available. For the time being, the simple workaround if you're using Skyetel as your provider is to designate a DID as a fax line (Call Routing: vFax) in the Skyetel Dashboard. Then Skyetel will manage the incoming faxes without any additional configuration on your PBX. You still can send faxes from within the AvantFax GUI.

Getting Started with ODBC for Asterisk

If you're new to the ODBC World, here's a quick primer. The idea behind Open Data Base Connectivity is to simplify the task of connecting up any flavor database management system so that it can talk to applications and foreign databases without having to write custom code to support every different DBMS. ODBC serves in much the same way as a translator who sits between you and foreign visitors. With the benefit of a translator, whatever is spoken is understood on both ends of the conversation. The real beauty of ODBC is that it is conversant with almost every DBMS offering on the planet including Oracle, Informix, SAS, MS Access, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Sybase, and even dBase, FoxPro, and XDB. All you really need is the ODBC connector for your operating system plus one or more database drivers for the DBMS data sources you wish to use.

Because the FreePBX modules are driven by MySQL tables, we've included the MySQL connector for Asterisk in Incredible PBX 16-15 together with two sample applications to get you started. If you add your own MySQL databases, it's easy to connect them with ODBC by simply running the odbc-gen.sh script in /root again. The two sample applications we've included will show you how to integrate ODBC queries into your Asterisk dialplan. The code is available in odbc.conf in the /etc/asterisk folder. The first sample is a typical employee database. By dialing 222, you will be prompted to enter the employee number (12345), and the ODBC app then will look up the employee number and read you the name of the employee. The second sample is a speed dialer using the AsteriDex database. The sample entries in the database include a 3-numeric-digit DIALCODE which simply matches the first three letters of each AsteriDex name spelled out on a phone, e.g. 335 = DELta Airlines and 263 = AMErican Airlines. As you add new entries to AsteriDex, you can add dialcodes in the same way or in any other scheme you prefer. Once you have signed up with a provider so that you can make outbound calls, just dial 223 and enter the AsteriDex dialcode to place the call. Think of it as a Speed Dialer on Steroids.

Where To Go From Here

Complete documentation on the FreePBX GPL Modules is available here.

Complete documentation on the Incredible PBX additions is available here.

An introduction to configuring extensions, trunks, and routes is available here.

Originally published: Monday, July 15, 2019


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Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

blankBOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

blankThe lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

blankVitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

blankSpecial Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



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Lessons Learned: Circling Back for a Second Look at OpenSIPS

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Whenever we tackle a new VoIP platform especially for deployment on the open Internet, we think it’s prudent to circle back after a few weeks to review lessons learned and tie up all the loose ends. Today we’ll introduce a number of new KVM cloud providers around the globe at rock-bottom prices plus some new additions to enhance our OpenSIPS firewall design. If you’re just getting started with OpenSIPS, check out the new KVM offerings below and then hop over to our original article which now incorporates all of today’s enhancements. For those that already have deployed OpenSIPS using our previous tutorial, continue reading, and we’ll show you how to deploy the latest and greatest additions.

While we were in the midst of deploying OpenSIPS, Netflix also disclosed four TCP networking kernel vulnerabilities which are especially important to those of us using hosted cloud platforms. Depending upon your provider, these may or may not be patched promptly.

We were reminded this month that reinventing the wheel isn’t always the best solution when it comes to VoIP security. While we’re not throwing in the towel on our BadGuys list, we do want to show you how to supplement it with the VoIP Blacklist from voipbl.org. It adds over 80,000 crowd-sourced IP addresses from around the world. The other lesson learned was that blacklists invariably include some IP addresses of good guys that you actually depend upon. These typically are added to the blacklist by, you guessed it, the bad guys.

With IPtables, the first matching rule always wins so it’s important in structuring firewall rules to insert whitelisted IP addresses BEFORE the blacklist entries so you don’t inadvertently block yourself or some other resource that you actually need. This whitelist should include the IP addresses of your server and workstations as well as the IP addresses of VoIP providers upon whom you rely for communications services. With our OpenSIPS design, the firewall order of preference looks like this: (1) whitelisted IP addresses get full access, (2) blacklisted IP addresses are blocked and get no access, (3) everybody else gets SIP access.

Rather than attempting to patch the Linux kernel on all of the platforms that are being deployed, we think the prudent first step is to narrow the TCP footprint of all public-facing servers. As part of the original OpenSIPS deployment, we already had hidden web access behind the firewall except for specifically enumerated IP addresses. The second most likely TCP vulnerability would be the TCP SIP ports. While we prefer to use UDP ports for SIP access, some prefer TCP. Until the “SACK Panic” vulnerability is patched, we would strongly recommend at least temporarily discontinuing use of TCP as your SIP transport. After all, OpenSIPS is a SIP server, and the TCP SIP port would be the most likely target for mischief.

Turning back to blacklists for a moment, we’ve put together a few simple bash scripts which make it easy to deploy and update your VoIP blacklists. We’ve also developed a script that lets you move IP addresses flagged by Fail2Ban into the ipset SIPFLOOD blacklist while easing the pain of uploading your own blacklisted IP addresses to the voipbl.org site for inclusion in their list. In this way, they will be added in the next day’s blacklist collection for everyone to use. To give you a point of reference, on our half dozen, publicly-exposed honey pot servers, today’s additions to the OpenSIPS firewall have reduced attacks to less than one a day.

Choosing a KVM Platform for OpenSIPS

For those that are frequent visitors, you already know that we’ve been pushing everyone to kiss their local hardware goodbye and join the cloud revolution. When it comes to public-facing VoIP platforms like OpenSIPS, most of us don’t have a choice. You need a static IP address on the open Internet. And, for the sake of security, a KVM cloud platform is a must since OpenVZ platforms don’t support the ipset component of IPtables which makes it easy to block hundreds of thousands of IP addresses without a performance hit on your server. While we previously have identified OpenVZ providers for our Incredible PBX platforms protected by the Travelin’ Man 3 firewall, pure whitelist access simply isn’t an option if you wish to retain the functionality of a VoIP application such as OpenSIPS. So we went on the hunt to identify KVM cloud providers around the world that could offer a KVM VPS with 1GB RAM, 20GB storage, and 1TB of monthly bandwidth for about $25 a year. No small feat! But our friends at LowEndTalk have come through. Read the message thread and find an offer with a site that best meets your requirements. Many of the KVM offers require you to open a ticket to get the special pricing and configuration outlined above. Here’s a short list of our favorites, but remember to only use the KVM offerings below for OpenSIPS!

ProviderRAMDiskBandwidthPerformance as of 12/1/19Cost
CrownCloud KVM (LA)1GB20GB +
Snapshot
1TB/month598Mb/DN 281Mb/UP
2CPU Core
$25/year
Best Buy!
Naranjatech KVM (The Netherlands)1GB20GB1TB/monthHosting since 2005
VAT: EU res.
20€/year w/code:
SBF2019
BudgetNode KVM (LA)1GB40GB RAID101TB/monthAlso available in U.K PM @Ishaq on LET before payment$24/year
FreeRangeCloud KVM (Ashburn VA, Winnipeg, Freemont CA)1GB20GB SSD3TB/monthPick EGG loc'n
Open ticket for last 5GB SSD
$30/year w/code:
LEBEGG30

Introducing the VoIP Blacklist

We’ve always dreamed of an effective VoIP Blacklist, and many have tried. But the crowd-sourced VoIP Blacklist at voipbl.org is the real deal. Everybody can post entries (including the bad guys) and, magically, most of the illegitimate entries get sifted out before the next day’s list is released. We’ve made this easy in two ways. First, the list gets populated every night while you sleep. At last count, there were 84,504 IP addresses. And, second, to contribute to the blacklist, run iptables -nL weekly to see if Fail2Ban has snagged any bad guys. If so, simply run the new /root/blacklist utility which will move them into your local blacklist and also format the entries for easy submission to voip.bl whenever you feel the urge. Simply issue the command cat /root/blcklist.txt to display the entries you just blacklisted. Then cut-and-paste the results and post them to the VoIP Blacklist. The whole process takes less than a minute, and you’ll be contributing to a very valuable VoIP resource while also using it.

Upgrading Existing OpenSIPS KVM/OVZ7 Platforms

If you already have installed OpenSIPS using the previous Nerd Vittles tutorial on a KVM or OVZ7 platform, then the rest of today’s article is for you. If you’re just getting started, hop over to our original article which now incorporates all of today’s enhancements including the VoIP Blacklist.

We’ve made today’s upgrade easy. Just download the OpenSIPS upgrade tarball, untar it, and run the included installer. In less than a minute, you’ll have all the new pieces without disturbing your existing configuration.

To get started, log into your KVM or OVZ7 server as root using SSH or Putty and issue these commands:

cd /
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/opensips-upgrade1.tar.gz
tar zxvf opensips-upgrade1.tar.gz
rm -f opensips-upgrade1.tar.gz
/root/opensips-upgrade1

Originally published: Monday, June 24, 2019


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Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

blankBOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

blankThe lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

blankVitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

blankSpecial Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



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Virtual Paradise: It’s Incredible PBX 13-13.10 for VMware

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Let’s face it. Virtual Machines are the future of server administration. Whether you prefer your own dedicated hardware or cloud-based resources managed by you or someone else, virtual platforms are the way to go. You get more bang for the buck out of your hardware by pooling resources for multiple tasks. VMware® and VirtualBox® make it easy. Today we’re pleased to introduce our latest build for VMware. It provides the latest Asterisk® 13 and FreePBX® 13 GPL components from source in about 15 minutes.

Just download the VMware .zip image from SourceForge to your desktop and unzip it. Fire up your browser and login to your VMware Web Console. With a few mouse clicks, you’ll have a CentOS 6.10 platform in place with Incredible PBX® just a single keystroke away. It doesn’t get much easier. And, you get the very latest release of Asterisk 13 compiled from source code that you can actually examine, enhance, and share… just like the GPL license says.

Choosing a Virtual Machine Platform

Making the right deployment choice for your virtual machine platform depends upon a number of factors. We initially started out with Proxmox 4 which looked promising. After all, we had used and recommended earlier releases of Proxmox for many years until some security vulnerabilities caused us to look elsewhere. Those kernel issues are now a thing of the past, but Proxmox 4 introduced some new wrinkles. First, to stay current with software fixes and updates, you have to pay the piper by signing up for the annual support license. This turned out to be a deal breaker for a couple of reasons. It was expensive since it’s based upon the number of CPUs in your platform. In the case of the hardware shown below, that turned out to be 4 CPUs (by Proxmox’s calculation) which meant the annual support license would run nearly $400 per year. That buys an enormous number of cloud-based virtual machines without having to babysit hardware at all. So we’ve reluctantly concluded that Proxmox 4 isn’t a particularly good fit for development or production use.

We’ve already sung the praises of VirtualBox so we wont’ repeat it here. VMware also is rock-solid and has been for more than fifteen years. VMware typically runs on dedicated hardware. If you don’t have the funds for a hardware purchase to support your virtualization requirements, then VirtualBox on your desktop machine is a no-brainer. For many, however, some separation of the virtualization environment from your desktop computing environment is desirable. That choice is equally easy. VMware wins, hands down. Better yet, you can make snapshot backups of your virtual machines in seconds with a single button click. If you’ve wrestled with backups on standalone hardware with Linux, you’ll quickly appreciate the difference.

Getting Started with VMware ESXi

Many of you have VMware platforms already in place at work. For you, installing Incredible PBX 13-13.10 is as simple as downloading the image to your desktop and importing it into your existing platform. Better yet, your system administrator can do it for you. If you’re new to VMware, here’s an easy way to get started, and the software won’t cost you a dime. VMware offers a couple of free products that will give you everything you need to run a robust VMware platform on relatively inexpensive hardware. The choice is up to you.

A Free VMware Platform for SOHO Apps

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Before you can download the components for the free VMware ESXi platform, you’ll need to sign up for a free account at my.vmware.com. Once you’re signed up, log in and follow these simple steps to sign up for a free ESXi license key and download the ESXi version 6 software:

  1. Write down your assigned License Key
  2. Manually download the VMware vSphere Hypervisor 6.5 ISO
  3. Manually download the VMware vSphere Client 6.5

Next, burn the ISO to a CD/DVD and boot your dedicated VM hardware platform with it. Follow the instructions to complete the install. Next install the vSphere Client on a Windows computer. Don’t forget to add your ESXi License Key when you complete the installation. Once the ESXi server is up and running, you can stick the hardware on a shelf somewhere out of the way. You will rarely interact with it. That’s all handled using either the VMware vSphere Client on your Windows Desktop or the VMware Web Console. Don’t forget to apply your License Key once VMware ESXi is up: Virtual Machines -> Licensing -> Apply License.

Deploy VMware Template with vSphere Client

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Deploying an Incredible PBX template takes about two minutes, but first you need to download the Incredible PBX 13-13.10 template from SourceForge onto your Windows Desktop and unzip it.

Once the Incredible PBX template components are on your desktop, here are the deployment steps:

1. Login to the vSphere Client on your Windows Desktop using the root account you set up when you installed ESXi. Choose File, Deploy OVF Template.

2. Select the two Incredible PBX components from your desktop PC.

3. Click Next.

4. Give the new Virtual Machine a name.

5. IMPORTANT: Choose Thin Provision option and click Next.

6. Review your entries and click Next to create the new Virtual Machine.

7. It only takes a couple minutes to create the new Virtual Machine.

8. The Main Client window will redisplay and your new VM should now be shown in the left panel. (1) Click on it. (2) Then click the Green start icon. (3) Then click the Console Window icon.

9. When the VM’s Console Window opens, click in the window in the black area. Log into your virtual machine as root using the default password: password.

10. To complete the Incredible PBX setup, you will automatically be walked through the short installation procedure when you start the virtual machine. Following the automatic reboot, just log in a second time as root and the install will complete.

11. To add Incredible Fax support with HylaFax and AvantFax, run: /root/incrediblefax13.sh.

12. Set up the proper time zone for your server: /root/timezone-setup.

13. Next, reset your root password and make it very secure: passwd.

14. Finally reset your admin password for web access to your server: /root/admin-pw-change.

15. Reset Enchilada passwords at any time by running: /root/update-passwords.

Press Ctrl-Alt to get your mouse and keyboard out of the console window.

Installing the vSphere Web Client

If you’re lucky, you may not have a Windows machine. The downside is that the vSphere Client described above only works on the Windows platform. After a good bit of searching, we finally uncovered a simple way to install the latest vSphere Web Client. It is pure HTML5 with no Flash code! While still under development, VMware has made progress, and it shows. Most of the feature set of vSphere Client now is available from the convenience of your browser. Just point it to the IP address of your VMware server like this: https://ip-address/ui/.

Here’s how to install the vSphere Web Client:

1. Log into the console of your ESXi server as root using your root password.

2. Press F2 to Customized System.

3. Choose Troubleshooting Options.

4. Choose Enable SSH.

5. Using a Terminal window on a Mac or Linux machine or using Putty with Windows, log into the IP address of your ESXi server as root.

6. Issue the following commands to install the latest vSphere Web Client vib and disable http firewall blockage:

esxcli software vib install -v http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/esxui/esxui-signed-latest.vib
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient

7. Using a web browser, login to the web client as root at https://ESXi-server-IP-address/ui/

8. Should you ever wish to remove the web client from your server:

esxcli software vib remove -n esx-ui

9. You may wish to disable SSH access when you’re finished. Just repeat steps 1-4 above.

Here’s what a typical Incredible PBX Virtual Machine looks like in the web client once you’ve added the VMware Tools to your virtual machine as documented below. There’s even a Console window.

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Under the Virtual Machines tab, you now can manage and add new VMs directly.

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Installing VMware Tools in a Virtual Machine

If you plan to manage your virtual machines using the vSphere Web Client and a browser, then you definitely will want to install the VMware Tools in each of your virtual machines.

For ESXi 6.0, your only choice is VMwareTools. Here’s how to install:

1. Start up your VM and login as root.

2. From the Windows vSphere Client, right click on virtual machine you started.

3. Choose Guest:Install VMware Tools.

4. Return to the Linux CLI of your virtual machine and issue the following commands. Accept all of the defaults in the installation script when it is run in the final step below:

mkdir /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
ls /mnt/cdrom
cd /tmp
tar -zxvf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools*
umount /mnt/cdrom
cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl

For ESXi 6.5, we prefer the new GPL VMware open-vm-tools. Here’s how to install:

1. Start up your VM and login to the VM as root using SSH or Putty.

2. From the Linux CLI, issue the following commands:

yum -y install --enablerepo=epel open-vm-tools
reboot

Special thanks to John Borhek (@unsichtbarre on the PIAF Forum) for the VMware lessons. 🙂

That should be enough tutorial for today. Enjoy your new VMware platform.

Continue Reading: Configuring Extensions, Trunks & Routes

Don’t Miss: Incredible PBX Application User’s Guide covering the 31 Whole Enchilada apps

Originally published: Monday, December 18, 2017  Updated: Monday, June 17, 2019


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blankSpecial Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



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