Categories
System Status

DNS issues affecting calls and routing

On 21-10-2016 there had been a widespread DDOS attack initially in the USA. This has affected service of some of our key voice and DNS service suppliers.

We monitor many sites and run monitoring ourselves and receive status updates from suppliers.

Below are some of the recent ones and some sites reporting the issue

http://www.diario4v.com/tendencias/2016/10/21/ataque-hacker-afecta-twitter-amazon-spotify-reddit-11816.html (you will need to translate)

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/21/technology/ddos-attack-popular-sites/

https://www.dynstatus.com/incidents/nlr4yrr162t8

Update
Dyn Managed DNS advanced service monitoring is currently experiencing issues. Customers may notice incorrect probe alerts on their advanced DNS services. Our engineers continue to monitor and investigate the issue.

Customers with questions or concerns are encouraged to reach out to our Technical Support Team.
Posted 4 minutes ago. Oct 21, 2016 - 18:23 UTC
Update
Our engineers continue to investigate and mitigate several attacks aimed against the Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure.
Posted 34 minutes ago. Oct 21, 2016 - 17:53 UTC
Update
This DDoS attack may also be impacting Dyn Managed DNS advanced services with possible delays in monitoring. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.
Posted about 2 hours ago. Oct 21, 2016 - 16:48 UTC
Investigating
As of 15:52 UTC, we have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.
Posted about 2 hours ago. Oct 21, 2016 - 16:06 UTC

Gradwell:

Our upstream supplier is investigating a DNS issue, which is believed to be causing the problem.

Magrethea

We are now able to confirm that two nodes on our network where impacted by DNS issues between 17:13 and 17:45 today. As many of you will be aware there have been some major DOS attacks today which impacted a number of key sites at this time so we are attributing this issue to that attack.

We will continue to monitor and apologise for the inconvenience this outage has caused our customers.

As can be seen this is out of our control and is affecting many users worldwide.

Categories
Blog Knowledge Base

BT outage on 20th July 2016

BT have confirmed that their recent outage has been ‘resolved and services restored’.

We can also confirm this as we have slowly seen all customer alarms clearing. As many customers are aware that we operate a 24×7 monitoring platform so saw this issue start and checked that there was nothing we could do in most cases but also contacted key customers to warn them that they might be issues.
Therefore, any issues that Customers have experienced this morning when connecting to services using BT connectivity (including quality issues) should now be resolved. In the event that issues are still occurring, please reboot equipment on the BT line such as Firewalls or Routers and retest. Nagios monitor screen

If you have any questions whatsoever please do not hesitate to contact us, Also if you are a
Asterisk / Freepbx reseller or user and would like affordable monitoring please get in touch as we provide Asterisk Monitoring from £25 per year.

Categories
Asterisk Support Knowledge Base

Nagios check_asterisk change for Asterisk 13

We noticed to day after a Asterisk server upgrade the Nagios check_asterisk plugin we use was reporting a”unknown”

It seems there is a minor change in response to the status request.

It was:

[root@elastix24 ~]# ./check_asterisk -h 127.0.0.1 -m mgr -u user -p secret  -vvvv
Running in Manager mode
Connecting to 127.0.0.1:5038
Connected to 127.0.0.1:5038
Asterisk Call Manager/1.1
Action: Login
Username: user
Secret: secret

Response: Success
Message: Authentication accepted
Action: Status

Response: Success
Message: Channel status will follow

Event: StatusComplete
OK  (idle) 

Its now with ami 2.7

[root@aubpbx1 ~]# ./check_asterisk -h 127.0.0.1 -m mgr -u user -p secret -vvvv
Running in Manager mode
Connecting to 127.0.0.1:5038
Connected to 127.0.0.1:5038
Asterisk Call Manager/2.7.0
Action: Login
Username: user
Secret: secret

Response: Success
Message: Authentication accepted

Action: Status
Response: Success

EventList: start
Message: Channel status will follow

Event: StatusComplete
OK  (idle)

So the plugin code need a small change to reflect this

diff check_asterisk check_asterisk_old 
162,163c162,163
< &unknown("Unknown answer $response (wanted Message: something)") unless ($message =~ m/^EventList:\s+(.*)$/i);
< &unknown("didn't understand message $message") unless ($1 =~ m/start/i);
---
> &unknown("Unknown answer $response (wanted Message: something)") unless ($message =~ m/^Message:\s+(.*)$/i);
> &unknown("didn't understand message $message") unless ($1 =~ m/Channel status will follow/i);

Once this is made seems to be reporting OK.

Categories
Asterisk Support Elastix Support Knowledge Base

Installing DynDns update script on Centos

The following is a simple run-through on installing the dyndns client for updating the ip address on your hosts.

cd /usr/src

wget  http://cdn.dyndns.com/ddclient.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ddclient.tar.gz

cd ddclient-3.7.3/

mkdir /etc/ddclient

mkdir /var/cache/ddclient
cp ddclient /usr/local/sbin

cp sample-etc_ddclient.conf /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf

cp sample-etc_rc.d_init.d_ddclient /etc/rc.d/init.d/ddclient
chkconfig --add ddclient

cd ..

vi  /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf

add at the bottom of file

#
use=web
login=USERNAME
password=PASSWORD
server=members.dyndns.org  
protocol=dyndns2
# add your DNS name here as below 
DNSNAME.dyndns.biz
#
/etc/init.d/ddclient start

You will then need to check that your host address has updated on the dyndns site.

If you get perl io ssl errors in the logfile then:

yum install perl-IO-Socket-SSL
Categories
Knowledge Base

Getting bad ELF interpreter with Nagios

When using some Nagios plugins to check server load and disk space on 64bit systems you may get back

/lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory

This means that you dont have the required libraries, To install them on Centos

yum install glibc.i686

The solution above works on CentOS, Fedora, or Red Hat 64bit operating systems; on a Debian or Ubuntu derived system use :

 sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

 

 

Categories
Case Studies

Multi-Site Multi-Country Asterisk network

UPDATE

We have recently added the 5th system to the customers international VoIP network. This system was for their Polish office and is linked to their Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore and London office systems.

Globe

For this site a Sangoma FREEPBX 60 system was chosen for ease of remote deployment and reliability.    The Tokyo & Sydney offices already has a Xorcom XR2000 systems whilst the London and Singapore offices have a Openvox  Asterisk solutions.  .

xe2000-xe3000

For the New International offices FreePBX systems were chosen as they provide a full turnkey system that can be sent out to the office plugged in. The systems initially obtain their IP address by DHCP and once a port is forwarded through the firewall to this address a fixed IP address is assigned and the customer firewall updated. Access to The GUI is by a SSH tunnel so that other than a random port for SSH and a port for IAX2 no other ports need to be opened on the customer firewall. Endpoint manager makes the deployment of handsets on the remote systems a simple and reliable process.

All systems have been linked by IAX2 trunks and the dial-plan configured so that desk to desk calls can be made between all offices and outgoing calls break out of the closest geographic system, for example a user in Sydney making a call to a UK number will have the call originate from the London system and the same goes for Tokyo, Singapore and Polish users calling UK or international numbers.

The network of systems is key to the support of the customers 24×7 support service. This is controlled by a dial-plan that is complicated by the fact that Japan does not have “Daylight saving” so even though the calls land on the UK system we had to configure the dial-plan to take into account local time in Tokyo and not base routing solely on UK time.  This has proved reliable and very successful.

All systems on the network are monitored 24×7 by our Nagios monitoring platform, Not only monitoring Asterisk but also monitoring the status of the international IAX2 trunks.

 

Categories
Knowledge Base Support

Mitel SNMP Alarm monitoring

As part of our ongoing improvements to our Alarm and fault monitoring service we are now pleased to be able to offer proactive monitoring of the Mitel 3300ICP snmp alarm output.3300
This monitoring is proactive, meaning we check the system at regular intervals from our Nagios platform and will raise alarms on power failing as well as all mitel snmp alarm levels.

mitel alarm example

The alarm can be emailed or txt’d to single or group of addresses.

All that is required is fixed external hostname or IP address and port 161 or another random port forwarded to port 161 so we can connect and the snmp configuration on the Mitel system to allow our systems IP address to connect.

If you are interested in this service the standard charge £25 per site per year for more details please email or call us.

Categories
Knowledge Base Support

24×7 Asterisk server monitoring with Nagios.

We offer an economical solution for end users and resellers to monitor their Asterisk and Linux servers.

Our platform monitors servers 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Hosted in a state of the art US based data centre with connections to major UK data centres and multiple connections to the internet.

We offer different levels of monitoring from simple uptime and email alerts to system load, disk space and channel usage with email and SMS notification. Web panel and firefox/Chrome plugin available to all levels to view system status.

The service is primarily aimed at Asterisk based IPPBX server but we can monitor other Linux based servers and Mitel systems as well. Our checks on Asterisk servers were customised by us to allow easy and secure deployment as we only require SSH access to make checks and this is secured by server keys. 

Nagios monitor screen

 

Service levels

Silver Level £10 setup – £2.50 per month £25.00 per year

  • Single Server, 4 services from list below & email alerts.
  • Ping test
  • SIP/IAX Peer availability
  • Asterisk channels
  • ISDN availability
  • Disk Space
  • System Load
  • Heartbeat Status
  • SIP/IAX2 registration status
  • Mitel SNMP Alarm status

Gold Level £10 setup per server – £5.00 per month £50.00 per year

  • Upto 2 Servers, 4 services per server, email and SMS alerts by subscription

In addition to the silver list:-

  • Asterisk Database status
  • Custom checks, (cost for design may be inured)

Additional options.

SMS alerts by arrangement, if using Gradwell Numbers and outbound we can integrate with the SMS API

Extra contact £5 setup

Extra server £10 setup £2.50 per month £25 per year

Extra service £5 setup £0.50 per month £5 per year

Partner options are available, Please contact us for details.  Pdf  download cymon 

Categories
Knowledge Base Technical

Nagios plugin for reading the Asterisk Database

This is a simple plugin that is based on one by Jason Rivers We have changed it now to read the ASTDB (Asterisk internal Database and then based on ok and Critical keys it will report OK or Critical staus reports to Nagios.

This was written for reporting if an Elastix system is in Day or Night mode.

You can define the Database Family, Key, Critical value and OK value. This means you can cutomise it to what ever you need to report.

 

The Code is below, make you may need to change /usr/bin/nc for what ever you use for netcat.

any issues email us, but dont forget this is given for free not supported for free.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Program : check_asterisk_ami
# :
# Author : Original code by Jason Rivers < jason@jasonrivers.co.uk >
# : Modified by Cyber-cottage.co.uk for checking the asterisk Database
# :
# Purpose : Nagios plugin to return Information from an Asterisk host using AMI
# :
# Parameters : --help
# : --version
# :
# Returns : Standard Nagios status_* codes as defined in utils.sh
# :
# Licence : GPL
#
# Notes : See --help for details
#============:==============================================================
PROGNAME=`basename $0`
PROGPATH=`echo $0 | /bin/sed -e 's,[\/][^\/][^\/]*$,,'`
REVISION=`echo '$Revision: 1.1.0.6 $' | sed -e 's/[^0-9.]//g'`
. $PROGPATH/utils.sh
print_usage() {
echo "Usage: $PROGNAME [-H hostname] [-u username] [-p password] [-P port] [-k DBkey] [-c critical] [-o ok] [-f family]"
echo " -H Hostname"
echo " -u AMI Username"
echo " -p AMI Password"
echo " -P (optional) AMI PORT"
echo " -k Database key"
echo " -f Database family"
echo " -c Critical Key"
echo " -o OK KEY"
echo ""
echo "SupportedCommands:"
echo " Most DB familiys that toggle such as DayNight in elastix"
echo "Usage: $PROGNAME --help"
echo "Usage: $PROGNAME --version"
}
print_help() {
print_revision $PROGNAME $REVISION
echo ""
echo "Nagios Plugin to check Asterisk ASTDB using AMI"
echo ""
print_usage
echo ""
echo "Asterisk Call Status Check. orignal version by © Jason Rivers 2011 changes to do ASTDB by cyber-cottage.co.uk"
echo ""
exit 0
# support
}
# If we have arguments, process them.
#
exitstatus=$STATE_WARNING #default
while test -n "$1"; do
case "$1" in
--help)
print_help
exit $STATE_OK
;;
-h)
print_help
exit $STATE_OK
;;
--version)
print_revision $PROGNAME $REVISION
exit $STATE_OK
;;
-V)
print_revision $PROGNAME $REVISION
exit $STATE_OK
;;
-H)
REMOTEHOST=$2;
shift;
;;
-P) AMIPORT=$2;
shift;
;;
-u) AMIUSER=$2;
shift;
;;
-p) AMIPASS=$2;
shift;
;;
-c)
CRITICALNAME=$2
shift;
;;
-o)
OKNAME=$2
shift;
;;
-k)
DBKEY=$2;
shift;
;;
-f)
FAMIL=$2;
shift;
;;
*)
echo "Unknown argument: $1"
print_usage
exit $STATE_UNKNOWN
;;
esac
shift
done
if [ "${AMIPORT}" = "" ]; then
AMIPORT="5038"
fi
if [ "${FAMIL}" = "" ]; then
##WARNING
echo="CRITICAL: Unknown KEY"
print_help
exit=$STATE_CRITICAL
else
## Checking Astdb
CHANNELS=`/bin/echo -e "Action: login Username: ${AMIUSER} Secret: ${AMIPASS} Events: off Action: DBGet Family: ${FAMIL} Key: ${DBKEY} Action: Logoff " | /usr/bin/nc $REMOTEHOST ${AMIPORT} | awk '/Val/ {print $2}'|tr -d " "`
if [ "$CHANNELS" = "" ]; then
echo "UNKNOWN: Unable to get ASTDB status"
exit $STATUS_UNKNOWN
fi
if [ "$CHANNELS" = "${OKNAME}" ]; then
exitstatus=$STATU_OK
MSG="OK: ${DBKEY} Asterisk Emergency message not active"
elif [ "$CHANNELS" = "" ]; then
exitstatus=$STATU_WARNING
MSG="WARNING: Asterisk Unknown status"
elif [ "$CHANNELS" = "$CRITICALNAME" ]; then
exitstatus=$STATU_CRITICAL
MSG="CRITICAL: ${DBKEY} Asterisk Emergency message active"
fi
fi
echo $MSG
exit $exitstatus