Bernhard Bock
a technology blog about Linux, virtualization and more

At a customers site, we did have severe problems with a SIP trunk and a Trixbox PBX (version 2.8.0.4, based on Asterisk 1.6.0.26). Both incoming and outgoing calls were dropping. I describe a short history of what we did to resolve the problem for others in the community, as I did not find a similar report in Google.

Most organizations try to perform some kind of change control for their Unix servers, be it for compliance reasons or simply because several admins are taking care of the same set of servers and need to know about what the others did.

For secure remote access to servers, one of the most secure access control mechanisms is the usage of one time passwords (OTP). With the setup described in this blog post, you can securely log in to your server even from untrusted client machines, like an internet cafe. A potentially installed keylogger would only log a useless, old one-time-password.

Here are some random improvements to the shell (bash) environment that I like to use on the servers I manage. You can simply add the code snippets to your .profile file.