How to setup Ozeki Remote Access through SSH

If you install Ozeki on a Remote Linux machine, you will meet the Remote Access is Not Allowed message. The reason is that, by default, remote access is not allowed for security reasons. In this guide, we will show you how you can remotely access the user interface to change the Admin password. After it the GUI will be available from any remote machine.

Step 1: Install Ozeki on Ubuntu

In the link below you can find a guide that demonstrates how you can set up the Ozeki Installer on your Linux machine. This product is a great app store that allows you to purchase any Ozeki product that you want in just one click. In that guide you also find how you can install the Ozeki SMS Gateway with Ozeki Installer.

So the Step 1 is to visit the "How to install Ozeki on Linux" page and follow the steps.

remote installation
Figure 1 - Remote installation

Step 2: Start Ozeki from the command line

In order to have a working Ozeki Gateway system, you need to launch the service for the program. You can do this in the command line of Linux. Please provide the following code (Figure 2) for the command line and hit enter.

service ozeki start

start the ozeki service
Figure 2 - Start the Ozeki service

Step 3: View the logs using tail

You can follow the process of the service launch using the logs. To view it (Figure 3), you can use the tail command that we provided below. If the service is started, you can find the IP:PORT where the GUI is available.

tail -f /var/log/ozeki/ozeki/ozeki_10_log.txt

view the log
Figure 3 - View the log

Step 4: Enable the ports in your firewall

Now in order to access to the GUI from an another computer you need to enable the ports in your firewall (Figure 4). Here you can find the lists of the most common ports used by Ozeki to help you with firewall setup: "Firewall configuration of Ozeki 10"

HTTP and HTTPS GUI

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --match multiport --dports 9513:9516 -j ACCEPT

Chat network
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 9540 -j ACCEPT

enable the ports
Figure 4 - Enable the ports

Step 4: Open browser from your PC

On Figure 5, you can see the error message that you get when trying to access the GUI before changing the admin password. It says the Remote Access is Not Allowed. By default the remote access is not allowed for security reasons. To have access to the interface remotely, you need to change the default admin password.

the error message
Figure 5 - The error message

Step 5: Configure PuTTY port forwarding

Changing the admin password is only possible from the machine where the Ozeki system is installed. You can use the PuTTY ssh tunnel feature(Figure 6) to forward Localhost ports to the appropriate ports on your Linux machine. This allows you to change the password remotely. We forward four ports:

9813 localhost:9513 HTTP port
9814 localhost:9514 Websocket port
9815 localhost:9515 HTTPS port
9816 localhost:9516 Secure Websocket port

configure the putty port
Figure 6 - Configure the PuTTY port

Step 6: Open browser from your pc

tuneled browser access
Figure 7 - Tuneled browser access

After forwarding the ports in the Putty by opening localhost, you can see that the Ozeki user interface appears (Figure 8). This way you can now change the password to access the GUI remotely.

the ozeki interface appears
Figure 8 - The Ozeki interface appears

Step 7: Setup a password

You will find a detailed description of how to change the Admin user password on the page below: How to change the admin password

login with the password
Figure 9 - Login with the Password

Step 8: Open browser without port forwarding

direct access
Figure 10 - Direct access

After changing the password, you can see that if you open the IP address of the Linux machine in the browser, the message Remote Access is Not Allowed will no longer be displayed, but you will be able to log in to the Ozeki system (Figure 8). Enter the new password for the Admin user to log in.

the error message is gone
Figure 11 - The error message is gone

More information