So after having an Incredible PBX 13 for the past 3-4 years I am going to install Incredible PBX 2021. This appears to be based on FreePBX 15. I’ve run across many threads about in-place upgrades and the various snafus. Trying to keep things simple, I’m wondering if this scenario will work:
Spin up the Incredible PBX 2021 VMware VM as a separate guest.
Backup the old Incredible PBX 13, which is its own VM.
Restore the backup over on the new 2021 VM.
Since I have all extensions using the legacy chan_sip driver I drop down to the CLI on the new 2021 VM and run fwconsole convert2pjsip -a in order to convert them to chan_pjsip.
Update the phones’ provisioning files so they are pointing to the new 2021 VM.
Gracefully power down the old VM, take a deep breath, and start testing things out.
Unfortunately yes. Ward may give you his opinion on how well Backup works with Incredible, but depending on the complexity of the setup, you might be better off recreating.
I have posted many times about my adventures with Backup - when it woks, it’s awesome, but my working-2-failure rate is about 6/4. Which means it fails about 40% of the time backing up and restoring 15 to 15 - backing up 13 and restoring to 15 is theoretically possible (Sangoma claims it works well) but my experience over the last year would say otherwise.
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I have run across posts on here pertaining to the backup/restore quirks that can happen. Looking at roughly 100 extensions, 10 ring groups, 4 IVR’s with time conditions, 50 DID’s, etc. Worst case I figure I’d have to have two screens up — one being the old VM’s configs and the other being the new VM’s configs — in order to monkey the settings over on the new VM. Of course I hope I’d be able to import in the extensions, routes, DID’s, etc. using the Bulk Handler at least.
At the risk of being flamed, I did come up with a Bash script that brute-force lifts the config off a machine and then you place it on the new - I would be happy to give it to you (it’s not complex) but since you were coming from a 13 machine, you would end up with another 13 machine - I don’t know if Incredible has an upgrade path for this?
Is it a Hyper-V Machine? Is something preventing you from upgrading it to 15?
The current 13 box is a VMware VM, and the new one I am planning to deploy as a VMware VM. Thanks for the offer! I figure that I can muddle through things using the Bulk Handler and split screens for the remainder. There’s no huge time constraint, so I can work on things in the background while everyone is still pointing to the current box.
Sounds good - I don’t know about your customers, but having anything not work EXACTLY like it did before I offered to do the upgrade makes them all blue in the face - NOT PATIENT at all!
I’m the only permanent FT IT employee for our sites. When folks would complain about how certain features worked differently I just would reply that the new phone system is free (repurposed our desk phones from the previous carrier) so it is what it is!
Oh I think that inside…lol. Especially since we were paying maybe $5,000 a month across all sites for Broadsoft-hosted services via Cincy Bell before. Even leasing those desk phones over the course of 5 years.
Quick status update. Rather than load up a new VM on-prem I decided to take the latest image from TheWebMachine Networks for a spin on AWS. So far so good. Enabled and configured the Firewall, locked down the AWS network security rules, finally went with CHAN_PJSIP, changed the SIP ports to something far from the norm, restricted web UI access to only the private LAN, installed and configured FOP2, configured the Kari’s Law E911 SMS/e-mail notifications, configured SNMP monitoring of active call counters, added the call stats to the CDR userfield column, etc.
The only thing that freaked me out was after one of the updates I ran, the reboot came back with fail2ban not running. And I could see all of the SIP port exploit attempts hitting every second (before I changed the SIP port values). I thought my box was already pwn3d! But ran across this helpful post that did the trick --> Fail2ban wont start. That was a quirk but easy enough of a fix.
Plenty to time to manually provision things like they are defined in production. The Bulk Handler can assist in making that easier in some regards.
