Wanna have your own infoline that users can call and navigate through using their dialpad (this is normally called an IVR, which stands for Interactive Voice Response)???
Well, all you need is a VPS (Mine is a 256MB Ubuntu server at hosteurope for 9.99€/month) and a VOIP-account (I went with a sipgate basic plan from sipgate, since it’s free and you get a local phone number with it).

If you haven’t done so already, you may wanna upgrade your ubuntu to hardy (although I don’t know if this is a requirement). Next, install the required asterisk packages:

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If you’re also thinking about doing a dist-upgrade of your Ubuntu VPS over at Hosteurope (from 6.06 LTS to 8.04 LTS), don’t dare. I just got off the phone with a technical assistant from Hosteurope, who confirmed that, at the moment, it is not possible to upgrade the system since that may very well cause problems with their virtualization software (I think Parallels Virtuozzo). So I guess I won’t risk it Well, I couldn’t resist And it seems to have worked by doing the following. Before I start, I should mention that I’m running Hosteurope’s “Virtual Server Linux L 3.0″ WITHOUT Plesk installed. Also I didn’t do the update using the new “update-manager”, but went the old fashioned way instead. So here it goes:

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A week ago I upgraded the Ubuntu system on my server from 6.10 to 7.04. I was a little worried since the last system upgrade I did messed up my whole Debian installation and finally made me re-install the entire system. At that point I switched to Ubuntu…

On a first glimpse the upgrade process went smoothly. Because my server is in a closet and I don’t have a monitor or a keyboard directly hooked up to it, I have to access it via SSH and (Tight-) VNC; and that’s where the fun started. While SSH access made no trouble, the keyboard layout was all scrambled. Typing “asdf” comes out to “abfh” and so on….After searching several forums I was happy to learn that I am not alone out there. Apparently it is a glitch in the updated Gnome version that causes trouble for the VNC client.

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