VOCP Command Shells -- Managing Your Systems through the Telephone

Patrick Deegan

Imagine you're out for a night on the town or just driving through the countryside, then your pager goes off or your cell phone rings telling you something's wrong at work. If you are responsible for one or more systems, this will eventually happen. But with a little forethought, VOCP, and a telephone, you can still solve the problem no matter where you are.

VOCP was released in 2000 under the GPL and is available at:

http://www.vocpsystem.com/

VOCP uses a computer and voice modem to implement a call answering and voice messaging system. It offers a suite of command line, graphical, and Web interfaces for configuration, control, and access (Figure 1). You can use VOCP to create a tree of boxes for menus, voicemail, pagers, faxing, and the like.

VOCP answers incoming calls and places callers in the "root" box, usually comprised of a greeting message and menu. Callers may navigate the system tree, moving from box to box, by entering choices with their touch-tone keypad. VOCP supports a number of different box types, and this article will focus on the boxes with the greatest potential value for the systems administrator -- the "command shell" boxes.

These "command shell" boxes allow administrators to interact with the system -- running programs and hearing their output. If you can run it on the command line or script it, you can now do it through any DTMF telephone. VOCP can accommodate any number of distinct command shells and provides fine-grained control over the executables that are available and under which privileges they run.