I am having issues getting FreePBX running. I need to install it manually to get it running stably under XenServer with the XenServer tools. Installing from an ISO delivers a working but unmanageable VM as you can’t get XenTools onto it.
I have stuck with CentOS 6.5 to avoid any complications with 6.6 or the new 7 branch, and it’s all hosted on XenServer 6.5, not that it should matter.
There seem to be some errors in the current manual install process on the Wiki.
- Set ownership permissions.
The line that says “chown -R asterisk. /usr/lib/asterisk” I think should read:
“chown -R asterisk. /var/lib/asterisk”
- Restart Asterisk and install FreePBX
The command “./install_amp --installdb --username=asteriskuser --password=${ASTERISK_DB_PW}” never runs correctly the first time. If you run it a second time it asks to overwrite/merge/keep existing files. Which should I do? Additionally it throws up permissions errors in /var/lib/asterisk despite the above command being run. I will run the process again later today if the error detail is relevant.
The command “amportal a ma installall” never runs through, erroring out with cxpanel needing ‘manager’ to be installed. You need to manually install manager before it can complete. Either manager is missing from ‘installall’ or the Wiki needs to be updated with the lines:
amportal a ma download manager
amportal a ma install manager
- Post install steps missing
The procedure needs to have steps added:
“amportal chown
amportal a ma refreshsignatures
amportal a reload”
Even with doing all this I can’t get it working perfectly. I have a VM I have managed to get asterisk and the portal running on, but the portal has a “Asterisk Manager Interface (astman) failure”, and I have checked the password in amportal.conf and manager.conf and they match. This may be because I kept files before that should have been overwritten, but while the Wiki states that the “amportal a ma installall” command can be re-run, it does not state how to handle failures and re-runs of “./install_amp --installdb --username=asteriskuser --password=${ASTERISK_DB_PW}”.
I am desperate to get this working. Our stand alone PBX machine is failing and I need to get a VM running to take over. I need it to have the XenServer Tools for management, so I am stuck with a manual install, but the procedure seems hopelessly broken.
Currently I install CentOS minimal by pointing the XenServer VM provisioning tool at /pub/centos/6.5/os/x86_64 of our internal CentOS mirror (hosted on a http server). If there was a similar repository for FreePBX I could mirror it and do the same and then run the install that way, but I don’t know if your current packaging even works that way.
EDIT:
I also had to enable .htaccess manually. I am assuming that a command was supposed to either edit http.conf, or http.conf should have been replaced at some point. Was this one of the files “./install_amp --installdb --username=asteriskuser --password=${ASTERISK_DB_PW}” should have updated/replaced?
I am very busy today, but I will try re-running the process from a snapshot I took mid-point. At least I can easily fork off offshoots of the process and try new things. Working with VMs make this sort of admin so much easier… once you get the software working, anyway.