FreePBX for Dummies?

Cyn, I’d love to see you elsewhere, you might hold all the answers I need, as I’ve stated to a number of other people, I can do the legwork so long as I have the right guidance, if I need to type something lemme know, and I can put in that work!

For the record; If ANYBODY here is somehow offended or insulted by the fact I’m on a budget, there’s no legal binding that says you HAVE to stay here, you can go, other experts would gladly swing by and see if they can lend a hand, and considering my budget, paid support is off the table for me, so to reiterate; I’m thankful for your input and willingness to help, I just have a rather unique situation, and frankly; I wish I didn’t… I wish my situation was a lot more common than it has been… but seeing as that’s not the case, I’m asking you all to bear with me, I’m in NO way an expert in this, so thanks for your patience…

As @cynjut explained, all the info that is needed is present in the link for chan-sccp-b
I followed it and was able to start using SCCP phones in less than an hour. Again, all the info is there, you just need to click the link and follow the instructions step-by-step.

Understood… I dunno, I guess I just like having my progress monitored actively while listening for instruction? I’ll jump into it later, I know I’ll need to re-flash my phones before I go loading SCCP firmware into it, so… I’d still like to take input, but… anyone got anything inspirational to say before I jump into it? Maybe an example SEPMAC.XML with the SCCP config I can use before I jump into it? Or am I able to use my existing config and change “SIP” to “SCCP”?

The SCCP manager, which also has instructions in thst link, has several templates for the different 79xx models.
My advice, you should jump into it and try to move forward by yourself. Not trying to be an a**hole, but with all the time spent in this back and forth interchange of ideas, you could already had it working if you just clicked the links and moved forward.

1 Like

I have yet to see anyone implementing chan_unistim but I’d be super interested in it if OP wants to add more diversity to his pbx. :slight_smile:

Looks like I might be the first to do this?

Life, man… not much I can do, life takes priority from hobbies… among other things taking priority, but I won’t divulge into it, the first thing I need is to prepare myself for the entire process, then I need to figure out why that source forge link is forbidden… which is one of the reasons why I needed to get into contact with Cyn…

Well said!

The reason I wrote the Wiki in the first place was to make it so that anyone that wanted to implement the Chan-SCCP-B channel driver and FreePBX SCCP Manager could without having to rely on me making time to hold their hand through it. I really did spend a lot of time tuning and trying to explain as I went what to do and how to do it.

If you need a hand, post it here. If there’s a problem with the document, I’ll fix it as you work your way through it. It’s not that I am not willing to help, it’s that I work a 60-hour a week job in support of another industry and have my household and my elderly in-laws household to manage and maintain. The little bit of free time I have is precious, so spending it reading a document to someone just doesn’t seem like it has a lot of value to me. I hope that’s not too harsh.

If you are really interested in doing this Cisco thing, the simplest way to do it to follow the Wiki I spent all that time writing. It should go fast and you should be on your way in no time.

I have seen people start it over time, but I’ve never seen anyone actually get it going. There’s no money it (from what I can tell), so it would have to be a “Masters Degree” project to make it worthwhile at all.

Makes perfect sense, I’ll be happy to have that link, if that’s okay? And there was a strange source forge link somewhere that was quoted here, what’s that about? Anyway… I’ll look into it…

When I originally started working with Chan-SCCP-B, the source was on SourceForge (I don’t think GitHub was even a thing). About 8-ish years ago, something happened and Dietrich moved the Chan-SCCP-B project to GitHub. The SF link is that old.

Thanks for clarifying, is a new link up?

The “new” link is about eight years old, so yeah, the new link is up.

FreePBX · chan-sccp/chan-sccp Wiki · GitHub should get your pretty close.

Some people have had cognitive problems with get command to download the files, but I think I’ve addressed those issues in the latest version of the guide.

Sweet, I’ll look into it

My first concern right at the top… is yum upgrade going to force my FreePBX to upgrade versions? If so, please tell me NOW before I touch anything, I’m worried about my VM breaking…

Definitely beyond what one would ask for free. Sorry. Please stop asking for this.

Does your vm not have a snapshot feature? If you are in the learning and playing around stages you need this. You can’t wait for community confirmation before every step. Take a snapshot, try something, see how it works, and either proceed or roll back.

It does? I just hate having to do rollbacks, and SOMETIMES the snapshot can break for some strange reason, but I’ll give this a whack, if everything goes right, expect an update in at most a month…

I don’t recall that you’ve said what hypervisor you’re using (and I’m not going to review 80+ posts to see), but almost all of them have a VM snapshot feature (even VirtualBox has this). In my experience, it’s very reliable, and it’s essential to testing things, as it makes it trivial to revert changes when they don’t have the desired effect. But with that aside, no, a yum upgrade shouldn’t upgrade FreePBX versions.

Not the Asterisk version - you do that “on purpose” and the channel manager code will just have to be recompiled. Each of the versions of Asterisk will have its own version of the channel driver, so while it might take a few seconds to get it back up and running after an Asterisk upgrade, “yum update” shouldn’t cause any problems - at least, it hasn’t in the 10+ years I’ve been using the driver.