AsteriskNOW 1.7.0 released, with FreePBX 2.7

With grateful thanks to the FreePBX community, Digium has released AsteriskNOW 1.7.0 with FreePBX 2.7.0. There are more details in the announcement on Digium’s blog, but here are some highlights:
[list]
[]Added a DAHDI card detection/configuration module to FreePBX
[
]Updated to FreePBX 2.7 and CentOS 5.5
[*]Incorporated many helpful suggestions from FreePBX fans
[/list]
As always, Digium appreciates your support of Asterisk and looks forward to continued collaboration in the open source telephony community.

Rod (and company) nice job on the ISO. I just installed on VM and the install was very fast. I like that I could choose 1.6 w/FreePBX, 1.4 w/FreePBX, 1.6 or 1.4 alone and even the AsteriskGUI.

So far I have not found anything broken at all and the dahdi is module looking interesting. I can’t wait to put a analog and a T1 card in a box and see what shows there.

Very nice.

Robert, thanks for the encouragement and feedback. Tony shared your Google Doc of post-install tweaks for AsteriskNOW 1.5, and you’ll notice much of that was incorporated in AsteriskNOW 1.7. Your input makes a difference!

If there are aspects of AsteriskNOW that can be improved to make it a more appealing distribution for your needs, while still keeping it a pared-down, “clean” installation, I’d appreciate hearing from you. Our issue tracker is always open.

Rod Montgomery
Product Manager, Digium

Will the DAHDI module for FreePBX be placed in the FreePBX repository?

Thanks for the excellent question. I would like to see all the Asterisk + FreePBX ISOs include the DAHDI module. Philippe and Tony gave helpful feedback on the module before we released it with AsteriskNOW, and I’d be glad to see them include it in FreePBX. This would alleviate the need to add the module in a post-install script. We’d be happy to help maintain it there to be sure it keeps up with DAHDI releases as well.

For now, AsteriskNOW is the vehicle to try the DAHDI config module for FreePBX.

Thanks Rod,

I could not find the module in your SVN to take a look at it, could you supply a link please?

Thanks

I made the switch from VM testing to hardware test to production and it went very well. During the first boot I needed to use the setup utility and turn on the ntpd and tftpd then set the IP and DNS and in the CLI I restarted the network.

So far, I am running the 32bit Asterisk 1.6 (During testing I found no harm in a YUM update, so I did that) then starting with FreePBX 2.7 and ( because I was migrating from a 2.8beta system) downloaded the FreePBX 2.8 tarball and installed it.

When I was done updating and restoring, the new DAHDI module was uninstalled. I re installed it and it “appears” to be functional still. I did need to install asterisk-addons for CDR functionality and having done so, my next challenge is to get FAX for Asterisk and Skype for Asterisk reinstalled.

Thanks for the testing and helpful feedback, Robert. The DAHDI configuration module is installed by an AsteriskNOW post-install script. The FreePBX 2.8 tarball doesn’t include the module or the script, so if you upgrade manually, you will need to manually reinstall it. This will be alleviated if/when the module is incorporated in FreePBX.

Re: Fax for Asterisk and Skype for Asterisk, stay tuned – we’re working on a FreePBX module that will install these Asterisk modules from within the FreePBX interface.

Thanks again!

Hi Scott,

The DAHDI configuration module for FreePBX isn’t yet available in public SVN. We developed it internally and shipped it in AsteriskNOW 1.7 only. The developer responsible is now on a brief vacation; when he returns, I’ll see about getting it published independently of the ISO.

Rod, I should have prepended my missive wrt the DAHDI module. It behaved pretty much as I expected. Although, the “install chan_dahdi.conf” link felt a bit out of place sitting at the top of the page (with no explanatory text.)

While I am all in favor of FreePBX modules for things that normally sit in the CLI, I am happy if (as this is an RPM managed approach) to be able to “yum install asterisk16-skypeforasterisk.i386” and be done with it.

I reflectively installed asterisk-addons for CDR, but that may have been wrong on two fronts. Philippe mentioned that it may not be needed and it prevents me from installing Skype for Asterisk.

yum erase asterisk16-addons* did the trick for allowing SFA… But the inverse is painful :

Setting up Install Process Resolving Dependencies --> Running transaction check ---> Package asterisk16-addons.i386 0:1.6.2.1-1_centos5 set to be updated ---> Package asterisk16-addons-bluetooth.i386 0:1.6.2.1-1_centos5 set to be updated ---> Package asterisk16-addons-core.i386 0:1.6.2.1-1_centos5 set to be updated ---> Package asterisk16-addons-mysql.i386 0:1.6.2.1-1_centos5 set to be updated ---> Package asterisk16-addons-ooh323.i386 0:1.6.2.1-1_centos5 set to be updated --> Processing Conflict: asterisk16-skypeforasterisk conflicts asterisk-gplonly --> Processing Conflict: asterisk16-codec_g729a conflicts asterisk-gplonly --> Finished Dependency Resolution 2:asterisk16-codec_g729a-1.6.2.0_3.1.4-1_centos5.i386 from installed has depsolving problems --> asterisk16-codec_g729a conflicts with asterisk16-addons-core asterisk16-skypeforasterisk-1.6.2.0_1.1.0.1-1_centos5.i386 from installed has depsolving problems --> asterisk16-skypeforasterisk conflicts with asterisk16-addons-core Error: asterisk16-skypeforasterisk conflicts with asterisk16-addons-core Error: asterisk16-codec_g729a conflicts with asterisk16-addons-core You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem You could try running: package-cleanup --problems package-cleanup --dupes rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest The program package-cleanup is found in the yum-utils package.

I think I will have to hand compile them now.

Hi Robert, sorry for the late reply, but I read through this thread again today and noticed that I never addressed your comment about the conflict between addons and SFA. I recently wrote an answer to this question on the Digium forum, so I hope you don’t mind if I just paste it here…

In your case, Robert, you may like the cdr_odbc module distributed with core Asterisk that gets around the licensing conflict with the MySQL client library. You can still export CDRs to a MySQL database, but doing so with ODBC allows you to install Skype for Asterisk, Fax for Asterisk, G.729, etc.

The dahdiconfig module is available in the FreePBX public SVN: http://svn.freepbx.org/contributed_modules/modules/dahdiconfig/

AsteriskNOW 1.7 uses CentOS 5.5 and the RPM packages that are built and published by the Digium Asterisk team. They’re available on the following repositories:
[list=1]
[]http://packages.digium.com (for proprietary software such as G.729 and Fax for Asterisk) and
[
]http://packages.asterisk.org (for Asterisk and other open source software).
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Using these repositories, you can install the same packages that AsteriskNOW does, without building a system from scratch. You may also upgrade AsteriskNOW in place without downloading an entirely new ISO image.

To include these repos on an existing system, run the following:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d wget http://packages.digium.com/centos/centos-digium.repo wget http://packages.asterisk.org/centos/centos-asterisk.repo

Then you can use yum update to install the latest updates.

Is there a method to install asterisknow on a remote server without using an iso/cd? That would be installed on an existing cento 5.5 minimal 64bit server.