A little off-topic... ok, a lot off topic...

Just finished re-writing a configuration I built for a Proxy server.

Proxy servers are a great way to tighten up your network security. Point all your users at the proxy server in their browser settings and allow only the proxy server to go out to the Internet in your inside interface firewall rules.

This example is built on CentOS 5.4 and utilizes squid, dansguardian, clamav and webmin. Daily downloads of malware and various blacklists are included.

Here's the build doc: SetupProxyServer.pdf

Very low overhead for this box. I built it on a single processor virtual machine with 512 MB RAM and a 10 GB virtual drive.

Some things I'd like to add include logging of userid to make logging a little nicer than just by IP address.

sipXecs 4.0.4 to 4.2.0 upgrade notes and impressions

Upgrade Notes:

Installed 4.0.4 fresh from ISO (dev build 4.1.7 on my test system was trashed).
Added a user / tested.
Fixed sipxecs.repo file replacing all '5.2' mirror references with '5'. (see previous blog post)
Ran YUM update from command line (265 items to be installed / upgraded, 374 MB worth).
Rebooted server.
A little patience was required on my relatively slow lab machine (800 MHz, Xeon w/1GB of RAM)... web services came up after a couple minutes.

Impressions:

New login screen is a little bland w/o graphic image.

Background job listed as failed on first login (problem listed as File replication: sipxpage.properties).
Created a paging group and re-sent the server profile and paging seemed to come up properly.

New GUI is better? different? I wish the tabs were starting from the left instead of centered.

Domain aliases of system IP address and host name are added automatically.

New user portal is nicer. Can't seem to import GMail contacts.

Branch concept in place... need to test.

Still no live attendant option as part of Auto Attendant.

Special Mode Auto Attendant configuration prominently available on Auto Attendants page.

GUI is much more sluggish on my dog of a test system (800 MHz, Xeon w/1GB of RAM)... time to upgrade I guess :-)

NTP server config in GUI is a nice add.

Alarm SNMP MIB now available on Alarm Configuration screen.

Alarm groups are now available for different notifications to different users (now including SMS and SNMP notification methods)

Much more but that's all I have time for at the moment...

Upgrading from sipXecs 4.0.4 to 4.2.0

One note that went across the mailing list (in case you missed it...).

Important Note on Upgrading:

There is a bug in 4.0.4 that breaks upgrading from the web user

interface. Specifically, it disables to use of the CentOS

repositories during the upgrade, which causes some prerequisites

to be unavailable, which makes the upgrade fail. The bug has

been fixed in 4.2 (and a bunch of other improvements to the

upgrade interface have been made too).

The best way to avoid the problem is to just do the upgrade from

the command line. Modify your yum repository configuration to

point to the repo where the 4.2 version is, and run 'yum

update', and when it's done, reboot.

I'm working on testing a 4.0.4 to 4.2.0 upgrade now.

sipXecs Version 4.2 just released!

Al Campbell posted today on the sipfoundry web site that version 4.2 is officially released!

http://www.sipfoundry.org/component/content/article/54-sipxecs42.html