I’m curious if anyone else runs FreePBX solely for home and personal use and, if so, what your backgrounds are.
It’s not surprising that most of the people here are telephony and computer professionals (who have also been very friendly and helpful – thank you all!). I’m neither of those, but have been running FreePBX at home for the past 3 years. I have 6 trunks – 3 Google Voice, one from a SIP provider, and two analog (MagicJack and Ooma), the latter through a Cisco SPA8800. I also use my cellphone as a trunk through an Obihai device. I send and receive faxes through the FaxPro module, and have approximately 15 SIP extensions (multi-line phones at home and the office, SIP client for my cellphone, etc.). My system works flawlessly.
Mine: I’m a lawyer with undergraduate and graduate degrees in the fine arts. I’ve never had a computer class, but I started with early IBM PCs which were DOS machines, so command line interfaces aren’t alien to me. I taught myself enough Linux to manage my FreePBX and have found that a combination of Google searches, the Wiki here and generous support from the FreePBX community has been more than enough for me to get and keep my system up and running.
So far, my only production system is for home use. I set it up because where I live I need to have a land line, but being in the dwindling list of land line owners, the telemarketers are circling like starved paranas. They had made my land line nearly useless. Using FreePBX gave me my land line back. Now when the phone rings, it really is for me.
My background is in IT and after the success I have had with my home system and the ease of setting it up, I have plans to roll out various FreePBX installs in my professional capacity.
Ph.D. Inorganic Chemistry here. Done lots of work with molecular computer simulations using SHARCNet for over 10 years. Worked as a POTS/DSL technician and Cable TSR/CSR years back.
Have a love for networking and underutilized emerging technologies. Got a single static IP at home with a /29 routed to it for email, PBX, cloud backup, media server, etc. Cluster of repurposed/refurbished laptops running Ubuntu, CentOS, and FreeBSD protected by pfSense.
For VoIP, Polycom VVX300 at home, Sangoma S500 at my parents house, Grandstresm HT502 to cover older analogue equipment until it all eventually dies, Zoiper for andoird and iOS as endpoints on LTE. One SIP Trunk through VoIP.ms, 8 DIDs, fax pro module.
