Continuing with the Asterisk setup, today we will see how to configure Ekiga to work with it, to install Ekiga, launch your package manager and use it to install Ekiga.

This time I will use a screencast to show you this how-to, this is my first try, so please be gentle if you see that is in poor quality, or if it could have been better edited, I am sure the next ones will start to improve, hope you may find this how-to useful.

Please be sure to read: simple Asterisk configuration to understand the parameters used in this video.

Some of the most popular posts here in Go2Linux are:

How to transfer files with ssh and 10 useful examples of the Linux find command

So, I have decided to merge them in a good tip to look for files in a remote server and then copy them to your local machine, I haven't already needed something like this, but it may be useful for someone (I hope).

I will write a bash script, that will do the work for you, if you want to run this as a script it will be handy not to need to enter the password for each single file to copy so you better use this post to enable login with no password on the remote server

Arch Linux have some kind of community driven repository, AUR (Arch User Repository).

There are a lot of packages there, you may want to install, the easiest way to do it, is using YAOURT (Yet AnOther User Repository Tool), this tool, will let you install packages from the AUR repository, as well as, the official Arch Linux repositories.

Now that you know that this great tool exists, you will have to install it:

In the past I have shown you, how to install Asterisk on Debian and CentOS, Now I will show you how to do it on Arch Linux

According to wikipedia:

Asterisk is a software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX) originally created in 1999 by Mark Spencer of Digium. Like any PBX, it allows attached telephones to make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Its name comes from the asterisk symbol, "*".

Asterisk also supports a wide range of Video[2] and Voice over IP protocols, including SIP, MGCP and H.323. Asterisk can interoperate with most SIP telephones, acting both as registrar and as a gateway between IP phones and the PSTN

Well, to install it on Arch Linux, we will use the AUR Tarball, as there is still no binary available to install using the normal pacman repositories.

I am paranoid about security, I am always looking for new ways to secure my server or even my Desktop PC, which sometimes I left up and running.

One of the beauties about Linux is that it is really easy to administer it remotely, but that is also one of the major concerns about Linux security, if you have weak passwords, you are exposed to attacks, there are lots of ways to protect yourself, one of the easiest is to close the firewall, and only permit access to port 22 from some specific IPs, but this is not an option if you travel a lot or if you do not have a fixed IP, at the place you use to be when you access your remote server.

Another approach is to have something like DenyHosts or fail2ban, both of them do almost the same, they block a port, (22 in the most used cases) when a threshold point of number of tries have been reached.

Now I have found another way, you may have your firewall closed by default, but you will be able to open it when you need to access your server, and closed it again after use, the package that will do the magic is knockd, and as its name says, you will knock the door of the firewall and it will open itself for you, but you will need a secret type of knock, it is like the "Open/Close, Simsim" (Open/Close sesame).

Now, let's go to the point, and see how to install and use knockd

This small how-to is to show you how to add users to existing groups, either new or existing users may be added to one or more groups at once.

In all examples I will use:

user: go2linux
groups: admin,printers

There are two possible scenarios

First of all, if you forget your admin Ubuntu password, you will need physical access to the PC in order to recover your password.

If you are running

polipo and run out of disk space you have two options, one is to reduce the space polipo is using in /var/cache/polipo/ thus, fine tunning cache server or to change the cache directory to its own partition. Here we will see this second option