Free PBX - instant activation of voicemail

Hi all,

does someone know if there is a possibility to provide the last (wo)man leaving with a shortcut to enabling the voicemail at that specific moment?
Our management dicided to change from specified timeconditions to more variable timeconditions. This means that the last person leaving the building, should be able to activate the ‘we are closed’-voicemail at a undefined moment, without having to login to the administration and change the configuration. Besides that it is not the obvious way to do this, it’s also NOT very secure as you all can imagine…

Apart of the how-to, I’m not even sure if it is possible with freepbx administration version 2.2.1…

Can anyone please help me, at least in the right direction??

Thanks a lot in advance!!

Menno

Menno,

Upgrade to FreePBX 2.5.something and add the Day/Night module. Last person out the door dials *280 and you are in night mode. First person in the door in the morning dials *280 and the phones are back on.

@John,

could you please explain to me how to update from version 2.2.1 to 2.5.x? I’m not familiar with FreePBX nor with linux/unix commandline-stuff.
Can you tell me how to backup the system prior to the update, and also how to perform this update?

We’re using FreePBX 2.2.1 (according to the Administration-module) with Trixbox CE 2.2.3.

Where can I download the right update and what do I need to update? Trixbox CE or FreePBX (with some sort of embedded Trixbox CE)?

Thank you in advance.

Menno

Check out Phillippe’s article:

http://www.freepbx.org/news/2008-08-13/freepbx-release-candidate-easy-upgrade-options

Bill/W5WAF

The module that the above link provides will not work as it’s for a FreePBX 2.4 core system on trixbox. To upgrade from FreePBX 2.2.1 to current you should make a backup first just to be safe then follow the directions on upgrading here: http://freepbx.org/support/documentation/installation/upgrading-your-system

I just upgraded one today from FreePBX 2.1.3 to the current version. It was running Trixbox 1.2.2, I think and the upgade of FreePBX went swimmingly.

Then, I backed up FreePBX. I moved the tarball created by the backup to my laptop and I copied /etc/asterisk and /var/lib/asterisk to my laptop just in case. Next, I “upgraded” that Trixbox to PBX in a Flash by installing the PBX in a Flash CD and reloading it all. I copied the tarball back to the phone server, and restored it from the FreePBX interface.

The customer’s phones were down for about 45 minutes.

Whatever you do, do not update Trixbox (unless you are updating it to something else :slight_smile: ). I stopped installing Trixbox a little over a year ago because of updates. Every time I ran one of their updates, it hosed up the box.

The link Fred, fskrotzki, gave above gives you step by step instruction on the update process.

By the way, there a several of us on these forums that will do this for you, for a fee. If you wish to go that route, just touch base with one of us.

Thanks people for the replies! I’ve upgraded from v2.2.1 to v2.5.1. which was surprisingly simple. The things I was most worried about were the downtime of the system and the possibility that something might not be updated correctly, but no problems occured.

So thanks again for your help!

Greetings,

Menno