Fred Posner

Last Thanksgiving, thanks to Covid, Thanksgiving was quieter than normal. This year, travel is expected to be close to pre-pandemic levels (air travel alone is expected to be 91% of what it was pre-pandemic). This said, we’re staying in Gainesville for the holiday and having a quiet celebration. Some of my family will joining my parents in Fort Lauderdale (which is looking like a decent, although smaller, turn out). We opted to stay in Gainesville primarily for AnneMarie....

The major announcement at ClueCon 2021 was the release of FreeSWITCH 1.10.7. Highlights from this release: fixes for security advisories (upgrade today) support for Debian 11 bug fixes etc There’s a great presentation from Sandro Gauci regarding the story behind some of the vulnerabilities he (and his team) discovered/submitted. Included in his story, is one of my favorite moments from Kamailio World. Read More Enable Security: Killing bugs … one vulnerability report at a time Speaker Deck: Sandro’s slides from ClueCon FreeSWITCH 1....

APIBAN helps prevent unwanted SIP traffic by identifying addresses of known bad actors before they attack your system. Bad actors are collected through globally deployed honeypots and curated by LOD/APIBAN. APIBAN started from discussions at tech conferences (in particular Kamailio World and Astricon). Most of the attendees had seen increases in malicious SIP traffic and we all thought there should be a way to share the active “bad actors.” When I found myself with some downtime, and with the support of LOD, some honeypots were deployed… and API made to share the data, and APIBAN was born....

Recently, I posted about using Kamailio’s PIKE module to help block excessive SIP traffic. This is a great tool for helping your system handle high traffic SIP, such as floods. But, what can you do when someone sends garbage or non-SIP traffic to your system? Kamailio’s SIP parser is handled in the core and was recently upgraded in v5.5 with logging improvements, as well as simplified implementation, static map for header name, and type for parsing....

After spending many years on Wordpress, I’ve decided to make a change in the software running this site. First of all, I have absolutely nothing against wordpress. I’ve used wordpress for well over 15 years at this point. There’s a simple reason why so much of the web is powered by wordpress – it’s clean, easy to run/maintain, and there’s great templates available. You can literally get started in 5 minutes....

The Pike module in Kamailio provides detection and alerting of “excessive” SIP traffic to your system. Within the module you can configure the rate limit, time period, and amount of time that the IP (ipv4 or ipv6) should be blocked. For example, you can configure your system to say that 30 requests from the same IP within 5 seconds should trigger a block of that IP for 5 minutes. I absolutely love this module and, in my case, Pike more often finds abusive traffic (like dialers) than SIP floods attacks....

Normally, I write these posts the night before Thanksgiving… after all, Thanksgiving remains my absolute favorite holiday. A time to gather with family (remember…. friends are the family you choose), express gratitude, and eat great food. The gather part this year didn’t happen thanks to the pandemic. Losing the bakery and not seeing family/friends since February made it hard to focus on what we have to be thankful for… not as hard as when Ricardo was murdered, but honestly it’s been a shit year....

Twenty years ago, I started The Palner Group, Inc. with the goal of providing technology consulting as a service. 2000 feels like a century ago (I’ve not thought about the millennium bug for some time now) and I’m using this anniversary to reflect on having this company for two decades. The Palner Group, Inc. isn’t my first business. A few years earlier I had started a nutritional supplement sales company (Vitastorm) with a great friend of mine, Rick Pallisso....

This has been a really different year. After attending ITEXPO back in February, I was looking forward to a great visit to Berlin for Kamailio World. Attending conferences is one of my favorite parts of working with open source VoIP software, like Kamailio, and to not have these personal connections to community is definitely offsetting. After the in-person conference was cancelled, a virtual Kamailio World was held this past September 2-3 to celebrate the 19th birthday of Kamailio....

Been a rough few months for the wife’s business and sadly, we had to announce the closure of Bearkery® earlier this week. For 10 years, I’ve watched Yeni pour her heart and sole into the bakery and although we saw it coming and prepared, the end was nonetheless heartbreaking. She’s done some amazing work… gained some incredible press (now and then)… and started the bakery from absolutely nothing. I couldn’t be more proud of my amazing wife....