Welcome to The Void

An old school Phreaker, Phriend and mentor:
Technology At Work

A fullstack wizard friend and mentor:
The Trove of Gems

In my own personal experience, when it comes to installation PBX servers there are generally two scenarios you will run into, at least in my line of work in Hotel/SOHO PBX environments, which, in all fairness is going the way of the Dodo. Nevertheless, let's dive in!
You will typically see Host based and Premise based PBX installs, there's also an interesting host+proxy install you can run into as well but we will touch on that at the end, also please keep in mind this is not an exhaustive list of ways to do this, these are just typically what I work in on the daily. :)
Host based PBX solution:
The companies I worked for will use AWS but ultimately it doesn't matter which cloud provider you wish to use, that will boil down to what your needs and experience are. So in the cloud you will have an Asterisk/FreePBX/insertFlavorOfPBXYouWantHere.
On premise you will typically have a firewall, switch, SIP Phones (hardware based or software based), Analog phones, NVT Phybridge Analog to SIP converters for connecting your SIP phones RJ45 port to an RJ11 2-pair port, and Analog to SIP gateways for true analog devices. This is not an exhaustive list as you will obviously have further materials and components, this is a very high level overview.
How will this somewhat look like and how will this all connect you might ask? Great question!
In short it will look something like this top down in a server rack:
Patch Panel - Neat and manageable cable management
Firewall - Routing and remote access
Switch - VLAN support prefably to connect all your components together
PBX - Call routing, Trunks, Queues, Ring Groups, the heard of the setup essentially!
NVT Phybridge - Allows you to run SIP phones over 2-pair cross connect wire
Analog Gateways - Allows you to connect analog phones to the PBX via SIP registartion
PDU and UPS - Protects equipment in event of brownouts/hard shutdowns

Troubleshooting section

Tips and tricks section

1. Overview

This section describes the physical and logical network design for my home lab environment The lab hosts a mix of personal and company owned equipment, separated by role and ownership. The primary goals are hands on learning, network segmentation testing, self hosted services, and a safe sandbox for enterprise grade equipment. 1.1 Scope

• Personal equipment: Modem, PFSense firewall (fw00), two FortiGate 60E firewalls (fw001 & fw002), Zyxel distribution switch, Zyxel APs, Asterisk PBX, Proxmox server, SIP end points.
• Company supplied equipment: FortiGate 40F, Ruckus AP, Ruckus switch which is all logically isolated from personal network items.

• Maintain clear separation between personal and company owned gear
• Provide multi-firewall architecture for routing and policy testing
• support VoIP services via Asterisk PBX
• enable controlled wireless access

1. Downloaded ProxMox VE ISO
2. Used Rufus to format USB stick for ISO install
3. Plugged USB into old Dell server
4. Booted into BIOS and booted from USB stick
5. Chose graphical install
6. Set Target Harddisk to the single SSD 1TB drive in the Dell server using an XFS file system (if multiple drives/redundant setup I would have used ZFS)
7. Setup region
8. Setup admin password and email address
9. Set static IP
10. Rebooted and completed the install
11. loaded my kali ISO under my local storage on node localhost and added and ISO image, under "ISO Images"
12. Went to top right hand corner of ProxMox and clicked on Create VM
13. Went through the standard setup options to configure hardware
14. Started my install
NOTE: To anyone else - if you see your image install continue to loop, don't forget to change the boot order/remove the ISO image from the CD/ROM under your VMS hardware :)
15. Logged into kali and updated and upgraded my packages
16. Created a baseline snapshot

17. Loaded my ubuntu iso under my local storage on node localhost and added ISO image under "ISO images"
Followed roughly the same steps for kali
Rinsed and repeated for Windows 10 eval. However, I also had to install virtio-win.iso by putting it into the hardware CD/ROM and then locating it in my Windows 10 VM and installing it.
For metasploitable, slightly different, had to upload the .vmdk via scp to proxmox server:
C:\iso files>scp Metasploitable.vmdk root@172.16.0.10:/root/
The authenticity of host '172.16.0.10 (172.16.0.10)' can't be established.
ED25519 key fingerprint is SHA256:xRVqOhKSPKc3291TvsXAU3O+tNAqnwcu4zYZeaH+MxU.
This key is not known by any other names.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])?
Warning: Permanently added '172.16.0.10' (ED25519) to the list of known hosts.
root@172.16.0.10's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
root@172.16.0.10's password:
root@localhost:~# qm importdisk 103 /root/Metasploitable.vmdk local-lvm --format qcow2
importing disk '/root/Metasploitable.vmdk' to VM 103 ...
format 'qcow2' is not supported by the target storage - using 'raw' instead
Logical volume "vm-103-disk-0" created.
Logical volume pve/vm-103-disk-0 changed.
transferred 8.0 GiB of 8.0 GiB (100.00%)
Shut down the VM if it's still running (force stop from Proxmox GUI if needed).
Go to VM 103 → Hardware tab.
Look for your SCSI Controller line (likely VirtIO SCSI or VirtIO SCSI single — this is the default when importing/attaching disks).
Select it → Edit (or Remove if needed, then re-add).
Change to LSI 53C895A (also called "Default (LSI 53C895A)" or just "LSI").
This emulates an old-school SCSI controller that Metasploitable 2's kernel understands natively (no extra modules needed).
unused0: successfully imported disk 'local-lvm:vm-103-disk-0'
root@localhost:~#
Metasploitable.vmdk 100% 1856MB 112.7MB/s 00:16
C:\iso files>

Self-Hosting RustDesk on Vultr VPS
In this project, I set up a self-hosted RustDesk server on a Vultr VPS for secure, private remote desktop access. RustDesk is an excellent open-source TeamViewer/AnyDesk alternative.
So why Self-Host RustDesk?

• Full privacy and control
• No usage limits or recurring fees
• Runs very lightweight (ideal for small teams or personal use)