Posts

Using Squid, Apache and Python To Develop a Captive Portal Solution

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You can also read this article from my LinkedIn from this URL  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/using-squid-apache-python-develop-captive-portal-solution-peter-emil When I was a student in high school, I was always fascinated with captive portals. It always felt like a super-secret powerful thing to redirect someone’s traffic to a website of my choice. Despite having this weird fascination, I never knew that this was called a captive portal until I went to my network security internship. During my internship, I was introduced to lots of concepts but never really learnt how to combine the ones I need to produce something like a captive portal page. Before we dive into this article you must first Have squid installed and configured as a transparent proxy. There are lots of guides on the internet that will i ns truct you on how to complete this step. Have Apache (or similar) installed and configured to use CGI (in our case, for a python script). [OPTIONAL] Have a local...

Bypassing VOIP ISP block in Asterisk

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This is an article I shared before on my LinkedIn profile a while ago, but I decided to re-share it on my blog with minor changes. You can find the LinkedIn article here . Introduction I was a new guy to Asterisk. I set up my users, my dialplan and everything seemed fine, until I wanted to let my users connect to my server from the internet. I set up port forwarding on my router, but when I tried to connect from an internet device, nothing would happen. Living in Egypt, I discovered that my ISP is blocking SIP. Attempting to use SIP over UDP port 5060 (which is the default) always resulted in failure. I decided to change the port number, tried again but to no avail. I also tried SIP over a random TCP port but it still did not work. I concluded that my ISP blocks SIP using deep packet inspection. So I did some research, read some RFCs (Request for comments) and I will share here the concepts I learnt and how they helped me get over these restrictions. Please know that thi...

Hello World!!

Hey and welcome to my blog. About Me. I would like to welcome you to my blog. I am Peter, a human being who lives in Cairo, Egypt with a passion for technology. I go to Engineering school at Ain Shams University (for obvious reasons) and I major in Electronics and Communication systems. I like to study a lot of technology related topics like VOIP, Python programming, computer networking and embedded systems among other stuff but I still haven't picked my favourite. I am also quite interested in humanities like history and arts. Moreover, I am huge video game enthusiast. a 3ds max design 2010 certified associate, and have regularly developed personal gameplay and graphical mods for the games I play. My gaming philosophy is, If you can't mod it, don't play it. I am very passionate about what I do and I take it very seriously all the while keeping it fun and exciting. I can't say I will be blogging regularly but I promise to blog whenever I have something int...