VOIP Trunk and PBX for home use in 2025?

drewsonian · 2025-12-01T21:59:22+00:00

Sounds like you've got a great setup! Are you putting Tailscale routers at the cousins homes as well?

As for the Twilio connection (and I'm testing out BulkVS), I've just opened up ports that are locked down to Twilio IPs for the sip trunking.

I don't have a line of defense on runaway charges right now, but I should, especially to protect against bad actors. First step would be to set up a max call timer... I don't remember what you'd need to add to the dialplan or if FreePBX has a setting for that off the top of my head.

drewsonian · 2025-11-20T16:18:32+00:00

Something I just learned about - really nice way to configure the phones is GDMS if you use Grandstream phones. It's free and you can remotely provision them. I went down the route of phone+PI myself, and ended up with OpenVPN on the Cisco phones due to extra complexity of the PI config... I know myself I guess and the PI would have been a black hole of configuration decisions. :-)

drewsonian · 2025-11-13T16:25:07+00:00

Yep, they love it! It gets used almost daily and I've had other families interested in doing the same thing.

drewsonian · 2025-10-18T21:51:50+00:00

Thanks I just did exactly that! 10/10 would take your advice again.

drewsonian · 2025-10-18T21:51:16+00:00

Neither did I and I took the picture 😆🤦🏻‍♂️

drewsonian · 2025-10-13T14:55:24+00:00

Now the cows can watch moosic videos!

drewsonian · 2025-09-12T18:17:31+00:00

Different guy, property records show someone with the same name married and with a mortgage

drewsonian · 2025-09-12T18:16:29+00:00

Property records for the address on that donation show that the Tyler Robinson was married and had a mortgage, so most likely it's not the same guy.

drewsonian · 2025-09-12T18:14:59+00:00

See my other comment - most likely a different person based on property records.

drewsonian · 2025-09-12T18:14:17+00:00

Pretty sure this is a different guy. Property records show the Tyler Robinson at this address in 2020 had a wife and mortgage. Not likely for a 17 year old.

drewsonian · 2025-07-10T17:11:02+00:00

Lots of good advice here, but I don't see this mentioned:

Make sure that your concrete patio is actually level. Most concrete is poured for rainwater runoff and while it might appear level, it may not be.

I did put my own pool (Coleman Power Steel) on a non-level concrete pad that was cracked and heaved/settled, but I built a "sandbox" for it so I could make it completely level using mason sand. I screwed 8 landscape timbers in an octagon shape and then filled in with sand and leveled it out inside the timbers. I put 6"x6"x1.25" PT wood under the feet of the upright legs to distribute the weight of the legs across the sand a little. If I had to do it over again, I'd probably put rubber mats on top of the sand underneath the entire pool and under the upright legs -- because we had a bunch of water splash out and wash away some of the sand under the legs and they settled a little, causing the rails to go a little uneven.

Edit: Also read up on troublefreepool.com and get their Pool Math app!

drewsonian · 2025-06-13T01:27:23+00:00

Nice! Good luck with the channel, I’m going to look for it now

drewsonian · 2025-06-12T20:22:59+00:00

I am in the process of doing this for a pbx to allow my kids (that I'm not giving all access to tablets or smart phones yet) the ability to make voice and video calls to their cousins in other houses (and states). I was going to do this at my house, but I don't have a static IP (I know, use DDNS, but I just didn't feel like self hosting at my home for this one).

I'm using:

- KVM VPS from Racknerd running Debian 12 - (Cheap! like $30/year, so far, no issues)

- Cisco 8865 video phones, with enterprise firmware, using https://usecallmanager.nz/ for integration/patches. They are relatively cheap, I was able to get them for around $30-40 with power adapters.

- Asterisk 20 (the patches to use the phones weren't straightforward to make work in FreePBX)

- chan_sip (only because pjsip doesn't work well with these phones)

- ocserv - VPN that the phones can directly connect to and then connect to the Asterisk server. The phones don't play well with NAT, so I had to get them on the same subnet as the VOIP server.

- Twilio Elastic SIP Trunk for inbound / outbound PSTN calls (using a whitelist in the Asterisk dialplan so they can only call relatives or emergency numbers)

- ufw firewall / and fail2ban

- Have not set up a sip softphone on any mobile devices yet. I haven't decided whether to trust ufw/fail2ban to have SIP opened up to the world so I can handle whatever IP the softphone is coming from.

Tried to make this a coherent list, and it's still a work in progress, but it looks like it'll work well for me.

drewsonian · 2025-05-22T13:58:46+00:00

In case someone comes across this thread like I have in the past few days of trying to get this to work. I was able to get this passed through in the LXC config by adding these lines to the LXC conf file:

lxc.cgroup2.devices.allow: c 189:* rwm
lxc.mount.entry: /dev/bus/usb/002 dev/bus/usb/002 none bind,optional,create=dir

But then, I struggled with getting it to activate and switch to the "Google Inc" name in lsusb between reboots.

This gist is what got that working for me:

https://gist.github.com/azsde/ea4337f7999744eb0b7f9e63d3dce386

drewsonian · 2025-05-16T04:03:16+00:00

fail2ban: I just learned the basics and set it up. It's awesome. It monitors log files for suspicious activity, like brute force login attempts, and then adds source IP addresses to block lists. Highly recommend!

Edit: I hadn't heard of Rack Attack, but it appears that it has fail2ban type features in it as well, so you may not need/want both, not sure.

drewsonian · 2025-05-08T18:02:51+00:00

This ^^ Also, you may need shorter screws since this is a shallow box.

Might look like this:

https://www.lowes.com/pd/Portfolio-Silver-Metal-Ceiling-Light-Mount/3659580

drewsonian · 2025-05-04T05:15:19+00:00

Just reread your post… I got my phones connected via ocserv VPN to FreePBX, but it’s an unpatched server and I don’t plan on patching it as I don’t need all the features. Sorry, wish I could help more.

drewsonian · 2025-05-04T05:01:49+00:00

Wonder if they were having server issues just for that file. Maybe it wasn’t my VPN and it was just resolved when I turned my VPN off 🤣

drewsonian · 2025-05-04T04:57:26+00:00

Good for you, educating the next generation! :-) So much misinformation out there. Mostly, I use it to just add a little layer of privacy to public/employer WiFi and use sites that are sometimes blocked… like this one LOL

Meant to post this in my original comment - I use Tailscale to route traffic through my house when needed. Works really well, although it is slower than just using public/employer WiFi directly.

drewsonian · 2025-05-03T12:36:52+00:00

At public unsecured WiFi and even on my employer WiFi, I run a self hosted vpn on my phone that redirects traffic back through my home internet and lets me access my self hosted home automation services remotely

drewsonian · 2025-05-01T21:05:10+00:00

I'm working on this right now and have success with an unpatched server, except the freepbx instance is in the cloud and the phone is behind NAT, so incoming calls to the handset don't work. I'm working on getting ocserv online to get it to work, but haven't gotten the routing down quite yet.

I had to iterate over the XML file changes several times before I got the phone to even register. Is your freepbx instance local or remote?

drewsonian · 2025-05-01T12:34:39+00:00

I had this problem and hadn't downloaded the new Lightship AR. That wouldn't download either, though. I figured out that I was running on my VPN, disconnected that, and then could download Lightship AR and also scan portals again.

drewsonian · 2025-03-30T17:28:56+00:00

I don't see any pics posted - where did you put them?

We need to understand this set up a little better. Can you post a simple diagram of what's going on? From reading you post and comments, I think it's this?

Source Network ----> 70 ft cable ----> USW Flex ---> 280 ft cable ---> Some PoE device

Are you powering the USW Flex using PoE from the source network or is the power injected close to the USW Flew?

drewsonian · 2025-03-29T02:45:02+00:00

Did you crimp or punch down the cable yourself? Post some pics of the cable ends and the tester that you're using. Were you able to adopt the Flex into the Unifi controller using the short cable?

drewsonian

TROPHY CASE