(Updated July 1, 2011 to include rudimentary test for string returned that doesn’t contain an actual IP address)

One problem faced by Asterisk users (and probably also users of other software PBX’s) is that you want to secure your system by not opening ports up to the entire Internet, but if you have remote users (users not on the same local network as your Asterisk server) you need to make an exception for them to allow them to penetrate your firewall.  If all your external users have fixed IP addresses, it’s not a problem — you simply add a specific rule in your firewall to permit access from each user’s IP address.  However, if their ISP changes their IP address frequently, or if they are using a softphone on a laptop computer, then you can’t just assume they will constantly be at same IP.  And if one of those users happens to be your boss or your mother, they are not going to be happy if they can’t use the phone until they make contact with you, and you enter their new IP address in the firewall.  And they’re probably not going to be real happy if they have to go to a web site or take some other action before they can make and receive calls.

This solution will work for many users in this situation, provided that you are using the iptables firewall. Again, the goal is to keep all your ports closed to outsiders, except for your authorized users. But if you can get each user to set up a Dynamic DNS account and then set their router to do the Dynamic DNS updates (as described here for DD-WRT users), OR failing that if you can get them to install a software Dynamic DNS client on their computer (which is a poorer choice because the computer has to be on for updates to occur), then you can run a script on your Asterisk box every five minutes to check to see if their IP address has changed, and if so, update iptables. I have one script that is called as a cron job every five minutes, and looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
/root/firewall-dynhosts.sh someaddress.afraid.org
/root/firewall-dynhosts.sh someotheraddress.afraid.org
/root/firewall-dynhosts.sh someaddress.no-ip.com

In other words it has one line for each Dynamic DNS host I want to check. For each host it calls a script named firewall-dynhosts.sh which in turn contains this:

#!/bin/bash
# filename: firewall-dynhosts.sh
#
# A script to update iptable records for dynamic dns hosts.
# Written by: Dave Horner (http://dave.thehorners.com)
# Released into public domain.
#
# Run this script in your cron table to update ips.
#
# You might want to put all your dynamic hosts in a sep. chain.
# That way you can easily see what dynamic hosts are trusted.
#
# create the chain in iptables.
# /sbin/iptables -N dynamichosts
# insert the chain into the input chain @ the head of the list.
# /sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -j dynamichosts
# flush all the rules in the chain
# /sbin/iptables -F dynamichosts

HOST=$1
HOSTFILE=”/root/dynhosts/host-$HOST”
CHAIN=”dynamichosts” # change this to whatever chain you want.
IPTABLES=”/sbin/iptables”

# check to make sure we have enough args passed.
if [ “${#@}” -ne “1” ]; then
echo “$0 hostname”
echo “You must supply a hostname to update in iptables.”
exit
fi

# lookup host name from dns tables
IP=`/usr/bin/dig +short $HOST | /usr/bin/tail -n 1`
if [ “${#IP}” = “0” ]; then
echo “Couldn’t lookup hostname for $HOST, failed.”
exit
fi

if [ ! `expr “$IP” : ‘([1-9])’` ]; then
echo “Did not return valid IP address, failed.”
exit
fi

OLDIP=””
if [ -a $HOSTFILE ]; then
OLDIP=`cat $HOSTFILE`
# echo “CAT returned: $?”
fi

# has address changed?
if [ “$OLDIP” == “$IP” ]; then
echo “Old and new IP addresses match.”
exit
fi

# save off new ip.
echo $IP>$HOSTFILE

echo “Updating $HOST in iptables.”
if [ “${#OLDIP}” != “0” ]; then
echo “Removing old rule ($OLDIP)”
`$IPTABLES -D $CHAIN -s $OLDIP/32 -j ACCEPT`
fi
echo “Inserting new rule ($IP)”
`$IPTABLES -A $CHAIN -s $IP/32 -j ACCEPT`

echo “Changing rule in /etc/sysconfig/iptables”
sed -i “0,/-A\sdynamichosts\s-s\s$OLDIP\s-j\sACCEPT/s//-A dynamichosts -s $IP -j ACCEPT/” /etc/sysconfig/iptables
# sed -i “s/-A\sdynamichosts\s-s\s$OLDIP\s-j\sACCEPT/-A dynamichosts -s $IP -j ACCEPT/g” /etc/sysconfig/iptables

echo “Sending e-mail notification”
`echo “This is an automated message – please do not reply. The address of dynamic host $HOST has been changed from $OLDIP to $IP. You may need to change the dynamichosts chain in Webmin’s Linux Firewall configuration.” | mail -s “IP address of dynamic host changed on machine name“ recipient@someaddress.com,anotherrecipient@someaddress.net`

As always, copy and paste the above script, so you can see where the line breaks are really supposed to be (the last line in particular is quite long, and will likely be broken up into four or five lines on the screen). Also, beware of WordPress or other software changing the single or double quotation marks to “prettified” versions — only the plain text normal quotation marks will work.

Note that prior to the first run of the script you will need to run the three commented-out commands shown near the top of the script, right after “create the chain in iptables”, to create the chain. For your convenience here they all are in one place, without the interleaved comment lines:

/sbin/iptables -N dynamichosts
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -j dynamichosts
/sbin/iptables -F dynamichosts

The lines in blue in firewall-dynhosts.sh are custom additions by me. Just in case something goes wrong, I suggest you make a backup copy of /etc/sysconfig/iptables in a safe place before running this script.  My first addition checks the first character of the string returned in $IP to make sure it is actually a number.  This was a quick and dirty addition to keep it from trying to use a string like ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached as a valid IP address (yes, it really did that).  I’m sure that the test there could be improved upon (for example, to do a full check for a valid IP address rather than just checking the first digit) but as I say this was a quick and dirty fix.  If you have any suggestions on how to improve it, please leave a comment.  I did find this article, Validating an IP Address in a Bash Script, but it seemed like a bit of overkill considering that in this case what I’m really trying to do is simply weed out error messages.

The second set of additions change the address in the dynamichosts chain of /etc/sysconfig/iptables. Please note that this file may be at a different location in some versions of Linux (such as /etc/iptables.up.rules), if so you will need to change this accordingly. This is particularly important if you run both Webmin and fail2ban. If fail2ban is running it will add some lines to the in-memory version of iptables, so you don’t want to do a simple commit to save the in-memory version back to the iptables file. But at the same time, if you use Webmin’s “Linux Firewall” module to maintain iptables, you want any changes in IP addresses to show up the next time you call up Webmin’s Linux Firewall page. So this simply does a search and replace in /etc/sysconfig/iptables on the rule containing the old IP address, and replaces it with the new one. There are two lines in that section that contain the sed command, the first one will replace only the first instance of the old IP address if it’s in iptables more than once, while the second (which is commented out) would replace all instances of the old IP address. Uncomment whichever you prefer and leave the other commented out, but bear in mind that if two or more of your remote extensions might ever be at the same IP address at the same time, you want the first version (the one that is uncommented above) so that when one of those extensions moves to a different IP address it doesn’t change the IP address for all of the extensions.

Note there’s still a possibility of missing a change if you are actually working in Webmin when a change occurs (since you’ll already have loaded a copy of iptables, and if you then make changes and save it out it could overwrite any change made by the script). But, the last two lines of the script send you an e-mail to alert you to that possibility. If you don’t use Webmin and don’t need or want an e-mail notification for some other reason, you can omit those last two lines, otherwise change the parts in red text to sane values for your situation. While editing, pay attention to the backtick at the end of the line (it’s easy to accidentally delete it when editing an e-mail address — don’t do that!).

When you’re all finished, make sure both scripts are executable and the permissions are correct, then create a cron job to call the first script every five minutes.

The only slight drawback to this method is that when an IP address changes it can take up to ten minutes to update (five for the Dynamic DNS to pick it up, and five more for the cron job to fire that gets it from the Dynamic DNS). Fortunately, most ISP’s tend to change IP address assignments in the middle of the night. Note that using the wrong DNS servers can cause the updates to take significantly longer; I set my computers to use Google’s DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) and that works fairly well. Note that if ALL your Dynamic DNS addresses are from freedns.afraid.org then you may want to change one line in the above script, from

IP=`/usr/bin/dig +short $HOST | /usr/bin/tail -n 1`

to

IP=`/usr/bin/dig +short @ns1.afraid.org $HOST | /usr/bin/tail -n 1`

This change will specify that the afraid.org DNS server is to be used for these lookups (and ONLY for these lookups, not for every DNS request your system makes – don’t want to overload the servers of this free service!). This may be particularly important if the DNS server you normally use is a caching server that doesn’t always do real-time lookups for each DNS request (for example, if you have installed the BIND DNS Server on your system). If some of the Dynamic DNS addresses come from other services then you could use a similar modification that checks a public DNS service that does not cache entries for long periods of time; as I write this Google’s DNS servers seem to update in near real time.

One thing some may not like is that this script basically hands the “keys to the kingdom” to your authorized users, by giving them access to all ports, or at least all ports not explicitly denied by rules higher in priority. It would be easy enough to change the rule that is written to iptables, or even add additional ones, in the above script, so that you could specify access to individual ports. The other problem is it works great for those external users at fixed locations that don’t move around a lot. It might not work quite as well as well for softphone users on laptops due to the delay between the time they turn on the laptop and the time your Asterisk server picks up the new address.

This has actually worked the best for me of anything I’ve tried so far because once you get the external user’s router set up to do the Dynamic DNS updates, they don’t have to think about doing anything else prior to making a call.

EDIT (December, 2015): If it is not possible or appropriate to update the dynamic DNS automatically from the users’ router, there may be another option. If any of your users have Obihai devices (or possibly another brand of VoIP device that includes an accessible “Auto Provisioning” feature that is not currently being utilized), you may want to know that they do not need to run a separate client to update their dynu.com or freedns.afraid.org dynamic IP address, because an Obihai device (and possibly some other brands of VoIP devices) can do that automatically. This is NOT a recommendation for Obihai devices, but if you or one of your users happens to already have one, here is the information as originally found in this thread on the Obihai forum, posted by user giqcass, who wrote:

Rough Draft for hackish DNS updates:

This hack will let your OBi update Dynamic DNS. It isn’t perfect but it works very well. It’s as simple as calling a url to update the DNS at afraid.org. I believe it would be a simple task to add this feature to the OBi firmware directly. So please add this OBiHai. Pretty please. Until then here you go.

Set up a Dynamic DNS host at http://freedns.afraid.org/
Go to the Dynamic DNS tab.
Copy the “direct” update url link.
Open your Obi admin page.
Click the System management page.
Click Auto Provisioning.
Under “ITSP Provisioning” Change the following.
Method = Periodically
Interval = This setting must be greater then 400 so not to over use resources. I use 3667.
ConfigURL = Paste the update link you got from afraid.org (use http://… not https://…)

Press Submit at the bottom of the page. Restart you OBi.

If you use choose to use dynu.com instead of freedns.afraid.org (which you might because dynu.com doesn’t force you to visit their web site periodically to keep your domain), the procedure is the same (after the first line), except that for the ConfigURL you would use:

http://api.dynu.com/nic/update?hostname=YOUR_DYNU_DYNAMIC_DNS&username=YOUR_DYNU_USERNAME&password=MD5_HASH_OF_PASSWORD

Replace YOUR_DYNU_DYNAMIC_DNS with your dynamic DNS domain name, YOUR_DYNU_USERNAME with the username you use to log into your dynu.com account, and MD5_HASH_OF_PASSWORD with the MD5 hash of your dynu.com password OR your IP Update Password if you have set one (which is recommended). To get the MD5 hash of the password you can enter it on this page. To set or update your IP Update Password, use this page.

The advantage of this is that if one of your users travels and takes their VoIP device with them, it would be able to change the dynamic DNS each time they plug in at a new location (not immediately, but after several minutes at most), so that if you use the technique outlined in this article your server will recognize their current address and permit access. Remember that it’s okay to use more than one Dynamic DNS service simultaneously, in case you or your user are already using a different one that doesn’t provide a simple update URL like dynu.com and freedns.afraid.org do. Other brands of VoIP adapters that have a similar “Auto Provisioning” feature may be able to do this as well, but we don’t have specific information for any of them. If you do, please feel free to add that information in a comment.

Note that we are not recommending any particular free dynamic DNS service. If you want to know what your options are, there is an article on the Best Free Dynamic DNS Services that will show you some options. You want one that is reliable and that will not disappear in a few months, but since we don’t have a crystal ball, we can’t tell you which ones might fit that criteria.