Linux

After my recent post about using SNGREP and HEP for TLS SIP capture with Freeswitch, not only did the Freeswitch team merge my patch that enabled better SIP capture with HEP, but Anthony Minessale (Freeswitch project creator) invited me to talk about my recent work in this area on their Cluecon Weekly video chat.

Encrypt all the things! This has been a popular sentiment in the open source community for the last few years. And with the rise of Lets Encrypt this has never been easier and cheaper to do.

One industry that hasn’t been so quick to adopt these new secure mentalities are wholesale VoIP providers. But this is changing and providers like Simwood, Voxbone, DIDLogic and Twilio now offer encrypted voice calls using SIP over TLS with SRTP media.

I’m pleased to say that my network timeout patch has been accepted into the go-beanstalk package this week. I’ve been a long time user of the excellent beanstalkd queue system. Since 2010 infact! What I really like about beanstalkd is its simplicity. It compiles to a small single binary and provides a super fast in-memory queue service that also persists jobs to disk allowing a server to be restarted without losing the jobs on the queue.

I realised over the holiday period that I had not changed my blogging theme since 2009, and with the new year fast approaching it was high time to give it a spruce up.

I wanted to make sure the new blog was “mobile friendly” and have categories and recent post blocks, as well as pagination of all posts on the site.

As my HTML/CSS/JS skills are not particularly up to date, I turned to the excellent Hugo site generator, and used the Mainroad theme.

Recently I wrote my first PHP patch to fix an issue with the SOAP module when using HTTP proxies in an unsupported version of PHP (5.6).

In my earlier post I have been experimenting with LXC on Debian 9 as part of my project to move away from OpenVZ containers. With good success. However at work we run exclusively CentOS servers, and have a lot of custom built RPMs and team knowledge around CentOS. To switch to Debian just to move away from OpenVZ containers would be a dramatic change and require the team to be re-trained.

Zoiper 5 and Freeswitch 1.6 don't allow encrypted calls to work out of the box due to a bug in Freeswitch with some of the newer RTP/SDES encryption suites.

After much time spent with the Zoiper support team (who are awesome by the way!), they suggested changing the cipher preference order in Freeswitch to disable some of the new suites that Freeswitch does not support fully.

I've been keen to try the new LXC 3.0.1 release on Debian 9, and have got it packaged by re-using the official Debian LXC and LXCFS packages, and tweaking the build process as follows:

I can't believe its been over two years since my last post! Where has the time gone? Well for one thing, I have gotten engaged near the end of 2016, so lots of 2017 have been taken up with planning the wedding! But that's not to say that I haven't been working on lots of Linux and open source related tech in the last couple of years too! Farewell OpenVZ. Hello LXC Probably the open source tech that was newest to me and has had the most impact this year is my switch from OpenVZ to LXC Linux containers.

My job involves me doing a lot of work with Freeswitch and for that it is especially useful to be able to debug the internal event stream via the Event Socket Library (ESL). Thankfully Paul Labedan has written a GUI in QT that runs on Linux and allows me to see the events in real-time. Here is how to install it on Fedora 22: First download the latest ZIP file from Github and unpack.