Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Capture Traffic on your sipXecs Server

Just a quick note on capturing traffic directly on the sipXecs PBX.

Personally, I'm a network guy and I like to use Wireshark to evaluate network traffic. Sure SipViewer shows you what the PBX is seeing for SIP traffic, but I want it all...

To capture directly on the sipXecs server, use the following command:

sipXecs: tcpdump -n -s 0 -i any -w filename.cap

Then you'll be able to use winscp to copy the file to your PC and open it with wireshark.



Saturday, May 1, 2010

sipXecs... the alternate build...

It's kind of like an alternate movie ending, or director's cut...

Douglas Hubler (aka, Lazyboy, aka, lazieburd) (Douglas' Blog) a long time sipXecs contributor and former Pingtel employee is offering up an alternative sipXecs build to the community build offered by Avaya.

Douglas has added back in some code that had 'disappeared' before 4.2.0 was released. Also, he is setting up build shop on the open suse build service which makes it easier to build for many other distributions. There are also some more builds for other distros than supported by the Avaya builds.

Basically the process to start using the new builds is to change your sipxecs.repo file and do a 'yum update'.

Backup your system and get the backup off of the PBX (the update does an in-place upgrade, but you can never be too safe).

Login to your sipXecs box as root and edit your sipxecs.repo file ('nano -w /etc/yum.repos.d/sipxecs.repo').

Comment out the existing sipXecs yum info with '#' in front of each line.

Add the following lines to the bottom of the repo:

[home_sipfoundry]
name=SIPfoundry sipXecs IP PBX Unified Communications Solution (CentOS_5)
type=rpm-md
baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sipfoundry/CentOS_5/
gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sipfoundry/CentOS_5/repodata/repomd.xml.key
enabled=1

The above is for a CentOS_5 distro... (ie., the sipXecs install from ISO). Check out http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sipfoundry for other builds. Builds are currently available in 32 bit and 64 bit for:

  • CentOS 5
  • Fedora 10, 11, 12
  • RHEL 5
  • Suse Enterprise Linux 10 & 11
  • openSuse 11.1 and 11.2

Once you have your .repo file setup properly, run a 'yum clean' and then a 'yum update' from the command line.

I rebooted my sipXecs box after the yum completed.

Big thanks to Douglas for the hard work he's putting in!