Noel's Muses

This post has been updated in 2022, originally published February 2021

TPG and ABB (Aussie Broadband) need no introduction, but the shite way one of them does business and treats its customers is the chalk to the others cheese.

Long time visitors to my blog, zonecheck, and usenet service would be well aware of the frustrations and problems I've had to tolerate with TPG. I took up their service in 2010 as a static-IP account, yet after about 6 years, TPG forgot the meaning of static-IP and changed our IP - without notice - not once, but three times, I only find out because people texting me Mail seems down, I tell them their bonkers I'm accessing it, only to realise hours later when I'm getting no new mail they were right something was definitely amiss.

Continue reading "From TPG to ABB"

(Original post February 14 2021 updated)
By default, ChanSpy, a supervisor function that allows you to monitor
other peoples calls, is enabled and can be used by anyone, yes, anyone, who's phone is logged in to a FreePBX system that has this feature enabled.

Sangoma don't allow you to secure it out of the box, instead, they try sell you some commercial module (that in Australia is about $145) that allegedly sets a PIN.

Continue reading "Secure FreePBX ChanSpy"

On or about August 28, kernel 5.14.0 was released, where APC UPS's (at least) no longer work because of control queue full errors, an error never seen here before upgrading to 5.14, as a result, the kernel logs rapidly fill up with thousands of lines of last message buffered x number of times.

But it's not just filling up your logs, the UPS's are not actually communicating with the system, therefore they can not protect you by shutting your systems down safely in the event of a low battery alarm.

Continue reading "Why We Don't Report Linux Kernel Bugs"

We all (hopefully) backup our PBX's - our config files, databases, even system audio and logs, some of this can be backed up hourly, daily, or weekly, so in all likelihood, you will have at least two backup processes probably more, but where do you back them up to?

Local storage? It's fair to say nearly everyone uses this, but is that the only place you have them? What if your disks fail? A lot of good those backups are now you can't access them!

Continue reading "FreePBX Remote Backups"

FreePBX, being a front end to Asterisk, allows setting multiple time periods under a single Time Group, usually for public Holidays and such, we call this Holidays - I know, so original

This article concentrates on Queensland, in particular Brisbane, Public Holidays, since only a few holidays vary between states, it will be easy for you to change to suite yours if you need to, likewise international readers, where many don't observe Show Days, ANZAC Day, or Easter.

Continue reading "Holidays With FreePBX"