Erroneous Marking Release

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So, Andrew is correct - the problem is fixed, but you can only get the fix if you ask the system in a very specific manner (while clicking the right mouse button with your left hand and pressing the space bar with your nose while hitting escape with your left ear)
And in more things which make you go hmmmm - Andrew reports that FreePBX 15 is still alpha. Somebody should really tell marketing:

Author: Jim Machi – VP of Marketing, Sangoma. Today, at the AstriCon Users & Developers Conference, Sangoma just announced that Asterisk 16 and FreePBX 15 are now available.
Source: https://www.sangoma.com/asterisk-16-freepbx-15-now-available/

No mention of Alpha or I certainly would not have upgraded. Last mention of Alpha was August. Was perfectly happy on FreePBX 14 and Asterisk 13. Relied on Sangoma press to do upgrade. Stupid user me believing Marketing.

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Serious question - since I am now totally screwed by “upgrading” production systems to Alpha code because I took a marketing piece at face value, should I just grit my teeth and hang on? I am FreePBX 15 and Asterisk 16. I would downgrade back to F14/A13 if possible without further disaster. All kinds of little issues popped up. Announcements not working. Incoming ringing not working. etc etc etc
Is there a “safe and sure” downgrade path?

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Since your the “cloud distro dude”, do you not have weekly snapshots that would suffice and put the system back into working order within minutes? Thats just one of the many beauties of virtualization in my mind.

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Excellent idea, and dead easy. I don’t mind throwing away a week of CDRs, rebuilding from scratch, and restoring pre-upgrade data from this weekend. But since Sangoma announced “release” the hope was that there was a way to “un-release” their erroneous production release announcement of an Alpha product. (see link above - which as of this moment is still not corrected)

So interesting questions would be - downgrade to 14 and leave Asterisk 16? Or is Asterisk 16 ALSO not ready for prime time and that should be downgraded as well? And, since the backup and restore module cross-version is Alpha in 15, what happens to a restore to 14? (Rhetorical question - bad idea.)

The current distro download is FreePBX 14 with Asterisk 15 - and yet just 3 months ago Sangoma was recommending avoidance of Asterisk 14 and 15 in favor of the LTS 13. Seems reasonable. Then 16 was announced as LTS. Is it? Or was Marketing jumping the gun? 16 is in version .0 which is always call for caution.

Sangoma Marketing caused the farshtunken, it is not unreasonable to request a suggestion for the least painful unwind. At least that is what I would have done during my 42 years in IT running up to 8,800 cloud servers and 16 petabytes of NAS before I retired. Yes, it is easy to react instantly in the cloud, just as it was easy to upgrade with the click of a mouse to…alpha software. Shame on me for believing marketing assertions. I should have known better. Marketing placed the developers in a very bad position. Now I want advice from those who DO know better.

“Cloud Distro Dude” comes from having build scripts which work on four of the largest cloud server companies in the world (though not Microsoft, Google, or Alibaba) and creates fully compliant distro installs without the use of ISO images. The scripts also fully enable softphone access for AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile through the firewall and fail2ban - hands off - 20 minutes start to finish.

Can’t tell you how distressing it is to get bitten by a bad software announcement. The nature of the upgrade makes rollback problematic without some headlights. Virtualization just makes it easier to screw up real bad real fast when you have incomplete, inaccurate information. Should have known better.

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You can’t have a Distro install without using the ISO. It’s no longer our Distro if you don’t install from our ISO so not sure what you are trying to say or get at.

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What is it with Sangoma? Instead of telling me that I can not possibly be doing what I have been doing since 2016 how about telling me how to unwind in the least painful way my mistake of believing your marketing department?

Or, how about getting out a corrected notice fixing the false statements made by your marketing department and still posted on your Web site? Oh hey, look, you are a publicly traded company. Look at the chart following that announcement. Cool. Hello, Ontario Securities Commission?

Or, how about giving a true planned GA date so that an intelligent decision can be made about unwinding, or not?

Your marketing announcement about the “release” of FreePBX 15 (“release” without any qualification means GA) on the other hand is completely false. Unable to determine if the Asterisk 16 LTS “release” is premature.

But, true to Sangoma form instead of dealing with the issue of users relying on false marketing announcements the COO is more interested in putting a (paid) commercial module user in his place.

AWS Install #1 - activated with paid commercial modules
PBX Firmware: 12.7.5-1807-1.sng7 PBX Service Pack: 1.0.0.0

AWS Install #2 - activated with paid commercial modules
PBX Firmware: 12.7.5-1807-1.sng7 PBX Service Pack: 1.0.0.0

Vultr Install - from Sangoma ISO activated with paid commercial modules
PBX Firmware: 12.7.5-1807-1.sng7 PBX Service Pack: 1.0.0.0
Compares module by module, kernel to kernel, in all respects to the AWS and DO installs - identical

DigitalOcean Install #1
PBX Firmware: 12.7.5-1807-1.sng7 PBX Service Pack: 1.0.0.0

DigitalOcean Install #2
PBX Firmware: 12.7.5-1807-1.sng7 PBX Service Pack: 1.0.0.0

Each one of these has been in stable production for over 1 year. Each went through the upgrade checker with full green checks. Each upgraded flawlessly. Now I have 5 alpha systems which I would not have had I not believed your marketing department.

So, do you still want to argue about a system that walks like a distro duck and quacks like a distro duck or would you like to take a breath, have a talk with yourself, and perhaps suggest the most appropriate steps people who acted reasonably on the assertions of your marketing department can take to re-stabilize their production environments? Otherwise I am not quite sure what you are trying to say or get at.

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Well you said it’s a Distro install without using the ISO which would not make it a Distro install and actually violates the Distro ToS you agree to when using it.

As far as marketing piece on 15 it’s factually correct. It’s a release of 15. Realase does not mean GA it means something got released. It was 15 Alpha. Quit blaming others.

As far as Asterisk and LTS maybe go over to asterisk.org and see that info for yourself as your attitude here is not going to get us to assist you.

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Image result for facepalm

Let me tell you a story. A little over 48 hours ago I talked with my boss @GameGamer43’s about what we can do to work on performance in FreePBX. Along with the wonderful Zulu team we discussed different ways to get past our bottlenecks, one of the ideas we brought up was to attempt to start using caching.

So to achieve this we added a single library Doctrine Cache. When adding this library to 13 we had to merge it into 14. To do that we had to rebuild composer (a library autoloader we use) and there is where it all went wrong. Mainly because the library Pico Feed was deprecated but not only that it was removed entirely from packagist. A few of you clever folks figured out you could find a fork of Pico Feed and put it into the PHP include folder and it would work, we thought about doing this for FreePBX but forks can have malware in them so we didn’t want to risk it, along with it also wouldn’t be part of Composer which is what we wanted.

So we went looking for a new RSS feed reader and came to SimplePie. To get this to work we had to add SimplePie to Framework and also reference it in Dashboard and UCP. Since I can’t go back in time and make an older version of dashboard and ucp depend on a newer version of framework I have to accept that this will unfortunately blow up in people’s faces because either framework will be too high a version or dashboard/ucp will be too low a version.

Then I ended up dealing with duplicate tickets yesterday. Over 11 of them all the same without referencing the oldest ones or cross referencing and so I incorrectly and wrongly shutdown and close two related tickets dealing with FreePBX 15. While the issue was related it was not the same as yesterday and I incorrectly closed the two tickets as duplicates and asked the two users to search the ticket tracker. Once I realized it was actually because the Framework fix wasn’t in FreePBX 15 I immediately went to resolve that. When I did I posted in both of the tickets, then I came here asking people are more information, if anyone else was having any errors.

You can’t downgrade to FreePBX 14 from 15.

That’s for you to decide. When Microsoft released Windows 10 did you buy it day 1? Depends on what type of person you are. Again it’s a personal choice.

Well it’s never been cross-restore/back in 14 or lower so why would it magically work now that 15 is in Alpha? You can take a backup from older FreePBX and restore onto 15+ but not 15+ onto 14 or lower

No it’s “Asterisk 13 or 15” as stated on the Distro download page. Yes we have said to avoid Asterisk 14. 14 and 15 were never LTS. 13 is. We didn’t make the rules. Digium did (at the time) so we are working within what we were told.

You went out and manually downloaded and manually upgraded your machines. Version Upgrader/PBX Upgrader is not available in the repos. You’d have to have copied the download link and run it manually yourself.

You can’t. Unless you use snapshots. Just roll with it now. You are on 15 and that’s that.

Point taken

Point taken

What does the fact that you paid for commercial modules have to do with anything you’ve said here. Are you using that as some power play?

That you manually downloaded. You copied the link. You placed the link into fwconsole ma downloadinstall. You read the blog. The blog that said it was an alpha. That is the only place to currently find/get the link.

From there it has spiraled so out of control and for that I am closing this thread. If anyone has any issues related to this feel free to open a new thread but I think we are done here

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