Freeswitch Installation

I recently needed to install Freeswitch for a singular reason: to register to another server when a SIP client registered to it. (What I call "register on register"). As I went, I decided to document the process of installing and configuring.

This server is running Debian 5.0.2, and is a virtual container on top of another Debian lenny install, utilizing the OpenVZ virtualization infrastructure. Note: During my first install, the container only had 1 GB of space. About half of that gets taken up by Debian. For whatever reason, that turned out to not be enough. I increased it to 2 GB, did a make clean, then proceeded with the make.

There are a few things interesting about what's going on here:

1. The freeswitch user
2. Starting then restarting

First, the freeswitch user. The default installation instructions do everything as root. Of course, this means that any security vulnerability in freeswitch gives a user root privileges on the box. (Does freeswitch chroot by chance?) As a response to this, I like to run freeswitch as an unprivileged user. Because SIP operates on fairly high port numbers, this *just works*. For a future installation, I would actually like two users - one for the configs and another for the program to run as. This would reduce the opportunity for a vulnerability in the software to give someone access to change the configuration files. That's for another day, though.

Second, the reason I started Freeswitch once with the console, then immediately shut it down was to watch for error messages. In my case, I did receive one error:

I haven't yet done either thing, or tried to figure out the story. That too, is for another day. After I got Freeswitch loaded completely, I shut it back down to re-start without a console. Perhaps there's a good way to background it from within the console, but I prefer to be tidy and just start it anew.

Soon, there will be another blog post discussing the changes from the default configuration that I'll make right off the bat.

-jbn