HowTo: First connection to Elastix

Once you have installed Elastix from CD (or whatever), then you need to make an initial connection and configuration.  This article details how to find what IP address your appliance is currently running with, how to connect to it, and how to configure it for initial operation.

Once the system has reboot after installation, you should see a screen similar to:

You need to logon with the user name of root and a password of whatever you set as the password during the install process, as show below:

The login will then show:

This has displayed the IP address of the web interface as:  http://192.168.1.106
You can use this URL to gain access to the web interface of Elastix.  Every install is likely to be a different address because Elastix is configured for DHCP.

If you system does not display this useful message, then you can gain the ip address by issuing the the following command:

ifconfig

Which will display the network interface configuration information like:

As you can see for the primary ethernet interface (eth0), the IP address is shown as ‘inet addr:192.168.1.106′.  Which is the same address that the login banner advised use to use.  This means the the URL for Elastix is http://192.168.1.106

You can now login to Elastix with your favourite web browser (I use Firefox) with the URL, as shown below:

The URL will change from http:// to https://.  This is not a fault and should happen and is perfectly normal.  However, with my Firefox securtiy settings, I get a page load error due to an invalid security certificate:

Again, this type of error in a normal web browser is perfectly normal.  In fact if you don’t get this type of error, I would suggest you seriously consider updating to a newer web browser.

You need to add a temporary exception.  I will demonstrate this for Firefox, for other browsers the process is similar.

Click the link on the page display ‘Or you can add an exception…‘ and this expand the display with two options, as shown:

You need to click the ‘Add Exception…’ button to display the certificate exception window:

You need to fetch the problem certificate with the ‘Get Certificate’ button and then unselect the ‘Permanently store this exception’ as shown:

We don’t need to store this exception permanently because we will be reconfiguring the IP address for Elastix to become static and because of the change of IP address, the certificate will become invalid again.  Accept the exception by clicking the ‘Confirm Security Exception’ button.

The browser will re-load the page and display the login screen for Elastix as shown:

You can now login with the user name admin with a password of palosanto.  Both in lower case:

And the default Dashboard will be shown:

We now need to change the DHCP issued IP address for a static IP address.  Select System->Network and you will be shown a page similar to:

You need to select the Ethernet 0 to configure the primary Ethernet interface, the following similar page will be displayed:

Set the Interface Type to Static and enter a suitable unallocated IP address and Network Mask for your network, and then click the ‘Apply Changes’ button.  My configuration is shown below:

This is only suitable for my network, you need to specify ta suitable address for your network.

A confirmation window is displayed, asking if you reall want to do this:

Click ‘OK’ to make the change.

These changes take effect immediatly (on clicking the apply button) and so the browser will be unable to follow the change.  You need to STOP your browser after clicking the apply and change the URL to the new address.  In my case this now becomes: http://192.168.1.152

And once the URL is changed, the page load error will be displayed again.  You need to add a security exception for this certificate again, but this time you can make it permanent as this is the fixed address for Elastix and so can be stored away.  Follow the instructions above, but this time don’t untick the ‘Permanently store exception’ tick box.

And the login screen should appear again.  You can login again.

Now we need to configure the remaining network details.  Select System->Network again:

As you can see above, the new IP setting for the network interface have been set.  You need to click on the ‘Edit Network Parameters’ to setup the final bits:

You need to complete the ‘Host’ with the FQDN of your Elastix system, the network ‘Default Gateway’, ‘Primary DNS’ and optionaly the ‘Secondary DNS’ servers.  Mine is shown partly below:

Sorry, but I have masked out the domain name my system resides upon for security.  The IP addresses I don’t care about because they are NAT’d behind a firewall, but with the FQDN, you could try and find it.

And that is the initial set up completed.  You may proceed with the other steps now.

Return to: Get your first Elastix system running.

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