FreePBX 16 - Housekeeping and Security

and for YEARS people have been calling for a base template for UCP, so new users dont log into a blank screen and scratch the crap out of their scalp not knowing how to set it up
so in the end give up, the very least it should have call history, contacts, voicemail by default, b ut likely 98% of all other feature requests its ignored in favor of sangoma concentrating of pushing all their commercial stuff.

This is why an open source project should never be controlled by a commercial business that sole purpose is pushing commercial modules for that open source project.

I put my hot take (read as diatribe) about this subject here

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It is not “some people”, it is Sangoma employees

This attitude is why most open source projects die after a year. just look at github stats.

Yeah, I guess I lumped attendees together not thinking about who they work for when I said that, but I would say that the same logic applies as well to sangoma employees as well as people not within sangoma - there are some that are always thinking about new product ideas, etc, and that’s just how they operate.

That being said, I still agree that having that come up often is probably off putting in a mixed environment, especially at an open source lounge.

This is something we’ve been thinking would be good for a while too, I think just a lot of other stuff has come up that has trumped it in priority. I’d love to see this happen though.

Matt

I remember that bug report! Thanks again for doing such a good job with all the reproduction info. I think at the time we were still focusing on migration bugs from FreePBX 13 and up and hadn’t started cracking back the layers to issues with systems prior to 13 for backup and restore and I’m guessing it got lost in the pile at the time. That being said, we’ve now worked a number of pre-13 issues so this one is a good one to be reminded about.

Thanks!

At least start testing using the newer version to head off issues later on.

The issue is STRICT_TRANS_TABLES is enabled by default in newer MariaDB versions. It can cause sporadic grief writing to some tables - casting issues with things like booleans to ints.

Currently for non-distro installs, we have to disable STRICT_TRANS_TABLES globally in the mariadb config. The better way, if you don’t want to fix/test all db writes, would be to disable the option in the framework session connect string. Existing FreePBX code would continue to work, but anything else that uses MariaDB gets the modern defaults.

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Chansip and pjsip are concepts internal to Asterisk and no endpoint including broadsoft knows which one you are using and it doesn’t make any difference to them.
If there is a working config for chansip, there is one for pjsip.
All that matters is that you get the config right, including the correct ports, etc.

freePBX is free…and you can set up a sophisticated phone system without paying a $. Although one should at least buy the commercial version of the System-admin-module. Is it $25? In today’s world open source doesn’t work on the long run, because the average user won’t spend (donate) a $.
I might be wrong…but in the past freePBX was the alpha/beta version of PBXact, or at least some kind of testing site. Sometimes one new feature in freePBX was accompanied by 2-3 new bugs. During the last 1-2 years or so, things improved significantly. I assume it has to do with some people leaving Sangoma and others getting promoted.
What I don’t understand is, what the benefit for Sangoma is to have two phone systems, PBXact AND Switchvox. To me it seems the Digium D-series phones are way better than the original Sangoma S-series phones. The same seems to be true for Switchvox.
So if, on the long run, PBXact will be retired…why would the freePBX project be of any use to Sangoma? So they definitely have to think about additional commercial modules etc…that’s ok, I am happy to pay for a solid phone system, which is as versatile as freePBX!

freePBX is free…and you can set up a sophisticated phone system without paying a $.

Free for use != free. If it takes me 10 hours to setup someone’s FreePBX system it is still costing them a bit of money.

There is no such a thing as a perfect product. Little example: the S-Series phones support VPN, the D-Series don’t.

I believe switchvox was originally a Digium product and PBXact was Sangoma. When Sangoma bought Digium they acquired Switchvox. I recently had a convo about the two products with my Sangoma rep and the general answer was that Switchvox is much more expensive but better suited to very large installations (100’s of extensions) whereas PBXact (including the cloud version) was cheaper and appropriate for medium or very small installations.

the S-Series phones support VPN, the S-Series don’t.

@PitzKey did you mean “D” series phones do not support VPN? Or perhaps the new P series? Because the D series do support the built in OpenVPN on FreePBX.

Yes, corrected. Thanks

Interesting. A Sangoma sales rep told me otherwise.

Got it running in my lab and at one client currently with all D series phones. Works fine through EPM with DPMA.

Only issue I had was that the initial connection of the phone to get it’s config must not be via the VPN. after the phone connects, gets it’s config and reboots you can then go back into EPM > Extension mapping and then set it to use the VPN. The phone updates and is on VPN from there and any subsequent reboots.

Some D phones and both P phones firmware have the OpenVPN client built in. At present you can provision the D6x series and the P31X series phones with Endpoint Manager and DPMA with the VPN. Other D phones may support the VPN as well (without DPMA), I don’t recall. We are working toward same with D80, but that’s a work in progress.

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FreePBX and PBXact are the same thing. Essentially PBXact is a value meal and adds branding. You can get all of the commercial components à la carte. It is cheaper to buy all the components as a package

That said you can actually handle MORE extensions with FreePBX because you can spec out your own hardware and build your own platform. Prior to leaving a few of the former developers and I put in a lot of time optimizing a system for 5,000 extensions. I don’t think it is a good idea to out all of your eggs in one basket like that but someone wanted it.

I think officially switchvox maxes out at 1,000 on their largest platform.

The sales folks and resellers certainly makes a lot more money on switchvox so there is that .

I have been using D65 phones and a D80 phone with freePBX and realized that the phones have additional features with Switchvox. For example, you can see on your phone with whom a colleague (info at blf button) is speaking with (if you want). All in all the D-series phones are much better products. You can search for a name, by pressing each key only once…and the phone will combine the info (2ABC) to find a name or a number. Furthermore the audio quality is great (ulaw, g722, opus16) and the phones are 100% stable, not so the S-series.

So, there is a reason why Switchvox is more expensive…and that’s ok :wink:

10 posts were split to a new topic: Future FreePBX Direction