Emergency Restore problems - Which Distro do I reinstall?

My pbx hard disk crashed.
FORTUNATELY, I had set up ftp backups. PHEW!
UNFORTUNATELY, the restore to the current distro didn’t work (because I wasn’t running the current version).
How can I determine which distro to reinstall so that my backup will restore properly. Is there a file I can view in the backup that will tell me?
I have found “Version” files that say
Astericks version 1.8.7.1
Freepbx 2.5
Another file of versions.txt with a changelog ending in 2.2.1

Sorry, but they are both very old, you will need to build a system with Asterisk 1.8 and FreePBX 2.5 to restore that image. I would advise you find the distro that you originally installed it on is the easiest way to do that, possibly a six year old version of PIAF if you can find it, other solutions need a lot of RTFM’ing.

Then surely

Reinstalled original and did a restore.

should have been

Reinstalled original,applied the updates I did before, and did a restore.

Few here can help you with the somewhat blonde statement “now asterisk wont start.” , please tell us why :slight_smile:

Did you as yet re-install that “critical patch” :slight_smile: ?

After installing from the distro
Asterisk CLI reads 2.11.03.
It appears that the required upgrade is to 2.11 to 12 Upgrade tool. Running that.

That might have been a mistake, you said you had 2.5, no?

If I where you I would go the forums of the distro you are reinstalling.

Yeah the whole thing sucks without RTFM’s , That’s why you need to go to the forums where you got the distro, because only they are likely to know how to fix their idiosyncrasies.

Nothing there to indicate it shouldn’t work apart from the notifications bit, that should not effect the functionality of your system, now if asterisk starts successfully . . .

is there a way to restart asterisk other than rebooting the system? When this happened before, the reboot didn’t work.

As far as the right forum to go to, am I looking for 2.5 or 2.11?

You definitively need a little RTFM here.

http://wiki.freepbx.org/

service asterisk restart

or

rasterisk -x 'core restart now"

or even

amportal restart

No, is it PIAF, AsteriskNow, FreePBX or something else, you installed it look at the big letters that flash past . . . :wink:

Reload failed because retrieve_conf encountered an error: 1
Added 14 seconds ago
(freepbx.RCONFFAIL)
Asterisk seemd to restart from the command line, but freepbx isnt seeing it

Then you did it wrong, again please read all resources available and go to the most likely forum that suits your situation.

What where the big letters that you first saw when you reinstalled your dvd?

Sounds like a very good idea. Good Luck

I’ve deleted most of the posts because they will not be helpful to anyone, summarizing the problem here:

I originally installed:
4.211.64 asterisk 1.8
Only did a few updates and when the system crashed, I restored from the original disk, restored from the full backup, and the backup crashed. I was able to restore from a month-old full backup.
Backup was missing system messages and voice mailboxes, which I was able to recover elsewhere.