Asterisk PBX v17 Docker

In light of the possibility of many people needing to work from home the boss wanted to upgrade the phone system to bring in some fixes and new features for home working.

I’ve no experience of Asterisk and I’m not really a phone person, but he asked me to get a replacement system using the latest v17 release. I noticed there are v16 images available, but he was insistent upon v17. That meant building from source.

It’s a week of firsts as up until now I haven’t built a multi-stage Docker image either.

PostgreSQL and Replication

We do a lot of postgres replication in our environment. Just about every docker postgres instance replicates its data over to a remote site for failover, should the worst happen. But we don’t tend to automate the process, maybe we should look at moving away from a manual failover.

Ansible and Client Certificates

Now we know how to inject client certificates into Firefox and Chrome it’s time to automate that process with Ansible.

The goal is to take a client and CA certificate and deliver it to the .pki keystore on the client. The actual generation of the certificate happens using easyrsa and is not part of this process. Let’s assume you already have generated a series of certificates, and converted them to a .pfx (pkcs12) for each client and just need to deliver them – although I may write up that process later.

Further let’s assume you are naming the certificate files with the same inventory hostname you are going to use in Ansible. This is so we can easily identify which file goes to which host, eg.

myclient01.pfx for inventory item myclient01.

PXE Boot and Linux Mint

Continuing the automated delivery saga Linux Mint is the thing that’s giving me difficulties. There are a few quirks installing Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia that really make it a not very good candidate for our needs.

NFS and iptables

Continuing with the theme of deploying systems automatically this chapter deals with using an NFS share to hold your iso images.

The problem I faced was the Ubuntu system I was hosting the iso’s on comes ready prepared with an iptables firewall. This denied my attempts to view or mount the nfs share from a client.