Acme SBC & ASC - Two Legged Call Issues

I recently ran into a strange problem using Oracle's (formerly Acme Packet) SBC. In this situation, the SBC gets authorization from calls by querying the ASC (Application Session Controller) - which, in turn, queries an application server. If the person calling is acceptable or the person being called is acceptable (in the case of inbound.)

This is useful in a couple of scenarios:

• You're presenting a virtual number. For instance, you want customers to be able to call a sales rep, but you don't want to give out the direct DID/number for the salesperson. In this case, the SBC accepts the inbound call, matches on the destination DID in the LRT (provided you are using an LRT) and sends the call to the ASC. The ASC either rejects the call (if the number is not authorized) or accepts the call. If it's the latter, it will open a second call (using the SBC) to the "real" number (which the ASC obtains from the application server) and then bridges the two calls together. Thus, a two-legged call. In this case, the ASC leaves the from field the same and changes the to field and the number on the invite to be the "real" number."
• You want to do some sort of processing/reporting on the call from a call manager. In this scenario, the call is routed to the SBC from another SBC or PBX. The SBC accepts the call based on the "FROM" key in the LRT. The SBC sends the call over to the ASC. If the ASC is okay with the call, it creates the second leg and bridges the call. It's possible to even send the call back to the originating call manager or SBC.

I ran into a strange problem  in the second scenario. I had restricted the codecs on the SBC for a given session-agent. The first leg was established with no issue. The call was forwarded over to the ASC. However, the second leg was the problem. The ASC opened the second leg, but the TO and FROM fields were reversed, breaking the call.

After investigating the issue (the logs from the ASC were not helpful,) I realized that the ASC was missing the appropriate codec (in this case, G729) and, I believe, was trying to send back an error message from the sender.

The fix, of course, was to enable the codec on the ASC.

Sangoma A101 Shows Up as Wrong Device On FreePBX Distro

After installing a Sangoma TDM card (the A101DE, a 1 port pci-e PRI card) on a FreePBX Distro system, I noticed that the system was detecting the wrong card... 

lspci showed something like:

02:04.0 Network controller: Sangoma Technologies Corp. A200/Remora FXO/FXS Analog AFT card

 
After looking around for quite a while, I decided that I wanted to run this card through DAHDI and not through the standalone system that I've used for years with Asterisk. The goal was to make this card managed as much as possible using the GUI.

Here are the steps I had to take:


1. Update the drivers in the OS:

sudo yum update dahdi*

sudo yum update kmod-dahdi-linux

sudo yum install wanpipe

2. Configure the card:

sudo depmod -a

3. which requires a reboot 

sudo shutdown -r now

 4. Now, get wanrouter to load the right kernel module

sudo wanrouter hwprobe

5. configure the card:

sudo wancfg_dahdi      

Your configuration here will vary. Make sure it lists the card you have. This script really just ends up calling the setup-sangoma script. You'll have to choose what's appropriate for your system. Note: I selected the option at the end to simply save the config files and not restart the modules, as I found that the option to restart the modules failed.

You'll want to make wanrouter/wanpipe start on boot (yet another script question.)

6. reboot, again

sudo shutdown -r now 

7. Go into the GUI to settings -> dahdi config -> sangoma and enable DAHDI management of Sangoma

8. reboot the system

sudo shutdown -r now

Now, you should see the right card in the DADHI section of the GUI.

 

Problems Joining OS X Mavericks to an Active Directory Domain

When joining a mac to an Active Directory domain, you might see this error:

Unable to add server. Node name wasn't found. (2000)

 One of the things that confuses people is that it asks for a clientid. This should be the computer name you want to use on the domain for the mac. Don't try to use your username or "domain admins" or anything like that.



 The other is the "server" field. If you were using LDAP for directory service, you would put in one of the LDAP servers. If you're using Active Directoy, put in the fully qualified domain name of your AD domain.

In this case, the time was too far out of sync on the Mac. Because AD uses Kerberos, the client machine's time must be within a few minutes of the same time as the domain controllers. By default in AD, this is five minutes. The time requirement is necessary as kerberos uses it as an anti-replay control.

Lenovo Thinkpad Laptops Failing to Connect to Wifi

I ran into a recent problem where a Windows 7 Thinkpad would not connect to wifi access points properly. It would connect to the Thinkvantage wifi profile, but networking was unavailable. Wired access worked fine, as did everything else. The problem ended up being the Thinkvantage tools.The advanced wifi settings of the network profile showed a power savings setting of maximum savings. Switching that to medium savings enabled networking. I suspect the laptop would have worked if the WAP was only a few feet away, but this user was over 30 feet away.

Moving from Ntop to Ntopng

I used to start ntop this way:
screen -d -m ntopng -u ntop  -m my.subnets,myothersubnets -i eth2,eth3 -W 4443 -w 40000 -M &


But this failed as the redis cache was not running (but was installed as part of the dependencies):

18/Mar/2014 16:50:33 [Redis.cpp:43] ERROR: ntopng requires redis server to be up and running
18/Mar/2014 16:50:33 [Redis.cpp:44] ERROR: Please start it and try again or use -r
18/Mar/2014 16:50:33 [Redis.cpp:45] ERROR: to specify a redis server other than the default

I now need redis to be running. I modified  /etc/redis.conf to point to /opt/redisdb for its "dir" variable and changed the owner of the dir to redis as well as chmoding the directory to 700.
So, in redis.conf,

#dir /var/lib/redis/
dir /opt/redisdb/

You'll probably want to copy the selinux context info, if you're using selinux:

As you can see:

ls -laZ /var/run/redis/

drwxr-xr-x. redis root  system_u:object_r:var_run_t:s0   .

drwxr-xr-x. root  root  system_u:object_r:var_run_t:s0   ..

-rw-r--r--. redis redis unconfined_u:object_r:initrc_var_run_t:s0 redis.pid

chcon --reference /var/run/redis /opt/redisdb

 I started redis, which was listening to 6379 on localhost only (sudo service redis start)

Ntopng also likes to have a data directory, so I created /opt/ntopng:

sudo mkdir /opt/ntopng
sudo chown ntop /opt/ntopng
sudo chmod 700 /opt/ntopng

sudo screen -d -m ntopng -u ntop  -r localhost:6379 -m my.subnets,myothersubnets -i eth2,eth3 -W 4443 -w 40000 -M &

But now, it was listening on eth0 as it didn't like the ordering of arguments. I saw this error:

18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:79] WARNING: No capture interface specified
18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:1438] Available interfaces (-i ):

18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:1459] 1. eth0 (eth0)

18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:1459] 2. eth1 (eth1)
18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:1459] 3. usbmon1 (USB bus number 1)
18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:1459] 4. eth2 (eth2)
18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:1459] 5. usbmon2 (USB bus number 2)
18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:1459] 6. usbmon3 (USB bus number 3)
18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:1459] 7. usbmon4 (USB bus number 4)
18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:1459] 8. any (Pseudo-device that captures on all interfaces)
18/Mar/2014 16:45:58 [NetworkInterface.cpp:1459] 9. lo (lo)

18/Mar/2014 16:49:52 [PcapInterface.cpp:68] Reading packets from interface eth0...

18/Mar/2014 16:49:52 [Ntop.cpp:573] Registered interface eth0 [id: 0]

Not desirable, so that becomes (I removed -M (I'm not sure what replaces "don't merge interfaces") as well as changed -u to -U and added -n 1 to resolve only ip addresses listed in -m (local))

sudo screen -d -m ntopng -i eth1 -i eth2 -d /opt/ntopng -n 0 -W 4443 -w 40000 -m mysubnets -r localhost:6379 -U ntop &

One last thing, you now need to set the password for admin, either via a file, by the gui (after logging in as admin/admin) or by the redis-cli client. I chose the latter.

redis-cli SET user.admin.password `echo -n "mylousypassword" | md5sum | cut -f 1 -d " "`

You can see the users in the gui or here:

redis-cli KEYS user* 

You can a new user either through the gui like so:

 redis-cli SET user.mynewuser.password `echo -n "mylousypassword" | md5sum | cut -f 1 -d " "`

Splunk: Importing Oneshot Files with a Source Rename

I had to import some old gzipped log files - so I simply did a:

splunk add oneshot /var/log/mylogfile.1.gz

The problem was that the source type was /var/log/mylogfile.1.gz and not /var/log/mylogfile - breaking some of the field extractions I use. I found that I could not use wildcards in the source to capture the field extraction, and I couldn't use sourcetype as there were multiples.

1. I figured out the ranges of the data and deleted it using a search

2. I readded the data using a oneshot with a rename-source

splunk add oneshot /var/log/mylogfile.1.gz -rename-source /var/log/mylogfile

(repeat multiple times for each compressed logfile of the same name)

Problem solved - though this will go against your quota as the data is being re-indexed.

Uninstalling Symantec Antivirus Client 10.2 from Windows 7 64bit Without the Uninstall Password

If you attempt to install Symantec Antivirus Win64 from Win 7 without the uninstall password, you'll probably find that people suggest that you change a registry key value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Intel\LANDesk\VirusProtect6\CurrentVersion\AdministratorOnly\Security\UseVPUninstallPassword from 1 to 0.

That doesn't really work for the 64 bit variant as the key locations are different. I looked around a bit and found that the key was here, instead:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Intel\LANDesk\VirusProtect6\CurrentVersion\AdministratorOnly\Security\UseVPUninstallPassword

After changing that 1 to 0, you should be able to uninstall without a password.