playSMS Gateway Plugin Twilio

playSMS is a web application for managing users, credits, features, routes and gateways, for sending and receiving SMS. playSMS is not an actual SMS gateway, it cannot send or receive SMS by itself. It needs another application or service, SMS gateway or gateway for short, to actually send and receive SMS. Twilio is one of those SMS gateway.

playSMS uses plugins for various functions and one of them is for handling those SMS gateways. Gateway Plugin in playSMS is referred to plugin that handles actions such as sending and receiving SMS for playSMS from/to actual SMS gateway.

In this article I will explain how to configure a Gateway Plugin Twilio to connect playSMS with SMS service in Twilio.

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playSMS 1.4.3 on VirtualBox

This article is about playSMS 1.4.3 installation on VirtualBox. What you need is a computer that is connected to the internet and capable of running VirtualBox properly.

To actually send and/or receive SMS you will need another piece that is not part of this article. You can discuss that in playSMS Forum.

I will be using Ubuntu 18.04 on my VirtualBox. That means you can compare this article with previous article playSMS 1.4.3 on Ubuntu 18.04. There should be similarities, but of course the previous article focus on cloud installation and this one is more like local installation.

Since the installation is local you will need to download Ubuntu Server 18.04 ISO file from Ubuntu websites, save it somewhere in your computer.

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Video Conference with Jitsi Meet

Getting a video conference system up and running in such a short time is easy with Jitsi Meet, a Free and Open Source Software. Successful installation will give you a voice, video, chat and screen sharing service. Not only that you can use it right away, you can also take a look at their source codes and customize it to suit your needs relatively easy.

Let’s do it. Prepare an Ubuntu Server 18.04, get it online with IP public, set DNS and point a hostname/domain to it. Login to your server via SSH. Once you logged in you can begin Jitsi Meet installation.

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playSMS 1.4.3 on Ubuntu 18.04

playSMS version 1.4.3 has been released, and it is the recommended version as it contains fixes to several bugs and critical security vulnerability. This article is howto install playSMS 1.4.3 on Ubuntu 18.04.

I’m using DigitalOcean (DO) service to test the configuration and commands. Create new Droplet in DO account. Click here to register on DO if you don’t have an account.

Choose Ubuntu 18.0.4 (currently 18.04.3 LTS) and select at least the cheapest service (USD 5). Create and wait for a minute or two for the SSH to be ready. You can then login via SSH and start playSMS installation.

Login to your CentOS droplet (later we will call droplet as server) using SSH and follow instructions below step by step. Read carefully why you need to do each step correctly. Please pay attention to details.

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playSMS 1.4.3 on CentOS 7

playSMS version 1.4.3 was released recently and currently it is the recommended playSMS version available. The release fixed critical security vulnerability and contains other bugfixes and improvements. This article shows you step by step howto install playSMS version 1.4.3 on CentOS 7.

I’m using DigitalOcean (DO) service to test the configuration and commands. Create new Droplet in DO account. Click here to register on DO if you don’t have an account.

Choose CentOS 7 (currently 7.6) and select at least the cheapest service (USD 5). Create and wait for a minute or two for the SSH to be ready. You can then login via SSH and start playSMS installation.

Login to your CentOS droplet (later we will call droplet as server) using SSH and follow instructions below step by step. Read carefully why you need to do each step correctly. Please pay attention to details.

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fail2ban for playSMS

This is how to use fail2ban to protect playSMS from invalid logins. Invalid logins can come from bots specifically programmed to guess playSMS passwords. Correctly configured fail2ban will ban/block/reject IP of users/attackers when playSMS got too many invalid logins in short period of time.

Please note that the actual ban is done by iptables, or whatever action command used by fail2ban.

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playSMS 1.4.2 on Ubuntu 18.04

EDIT:

This article is old. Please use playSMS version 1.4.3 instead. Previous version of playSMS contains security vulnerabilities and have been fixed in 1.4.3.

Same method described in this article can still be used to install playSMS 1.4.3, you just need to change 1.4.2 to 1.4.3.

This howto will show you how to install playSMS 1.4.2 on Ubuntu 18.04, the latest version as of today. By using Ubuntu 18.04 as base distribution you can test whether or not playSMS 1.4.2 work properly with PHP 7.2 and MySQL 5.7.

Let’s Start

Login to your DigitalOcean web panel. If you haven’t got one then register for free here: https://m.do.co/c/aeec1cef58b6

Shameless plug: Notice the referral link there ? Yes, please click it so that you can earn USD 10 credit on DigitalOcean (for testing this howto maybe?) and when you actually use and spent money on DigitalOcean then I’ll also get something from them too :)

Q: Can I install on different server other than DigitalOcean ?
A: Yes of course, you need Internet and preferably CLI root access

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playSMS 1.4 on CentOS 7.2 with MariaDB 5.5.50

Yet another playSMS 1.4 installation article, this time its on CentOS 7.2 with MariaDB 5.5.50 instead of MySQL.

Prepare VPS

I’m using DigitalOcean VPS service and install CentOS 7.2 with enough RAM and disk, I choose 512MB RAM and 20GB SSD disk.

Notes:
You can always use your own VPS or any other method to install CentOS.

Update CentOS

SSH to VPS and update CentOS:

yum update

Notes:
Updating CentOS may take sometime to finish, and if you know what you’re doing than you can just skip this step.

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playSMS 1.4 on Ubuntu 16.04 with PHP 7.0

This is the tutorial of howto install playSMS 1.4 on Ubuntu 16.04 with PHP 7.0. I’m using DigitalOcean to write this tutorial. I choose Nginx as the web server and MySQL as the database server.

There are 9 steps that you need to do correctly and in order. It seems complicated and looks like a long tutorial, but its relatively easy to follow and straightforward. Post your question in playSMS user forum should you encountered any problem following this tutorial.

In this tutorial the password is not secure and I’m logged in as root. If you know what you’re doing then you should know that you can always use any Ubuntu 16.04 server, not just on DigitalOcean. And you can always use your own secure password and use non-root login.

Let’s start.

Step 1

Login to your DigitalOcean account, create a Ubuntu 16.04 x64 droplet. In about 2 minutes you’ll have a working Ubuntu 16.04 server. Use SSH to access your server.

If you haven’t got the account, register and I think you’ll get a chance to create a free droplet.

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OpenSIPS on Ubuntu Part 3

Let’s add authentication on this part. Yes, that is the main focus of this article, to add an authentication mechanism so that SIP User Agent (SIP UA) can be authenticated by OpenSIPS.

Upon giving the username and password, UA will send a SIP REGISTER request to OpenSIPS. On 2 previous articles (part 1 and part 2) those SIP REGISTERs were ignored, all UA were just saved on user location by OpenSIPS regardless of what username or password they sent.

Of course we don’t want that for a production server, we want UAs to be authenticated with correct username and password. The username and password that admin set on OpenSIPS for each UA.

Please note that this article is the 3rd part of OpenSIPS on Ubuntu howto series. In order to successfully understood the content of this part you must previously followed article part 1 and part 2:

  • Part 1 talks about OpenSIPS installation and basic configuration.
  • Part 2 talks about how MediaProxy can be used to help OpenSIPS overcome certain NAT issues.

Let’s start part 3: all about authentication.

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