I need to migrate an existing AsteriskNOW/FreePBX installation to Debian 6 (“squeeze”) running as a virtual machine (VM) on either VMware Player or VirtualBox. In the process I’d like to get out of AsteriskNOW and go to a FreePBX distribution.
There are several available instruction sheets on how to install Asterisk / FreePBX on Debian… can you all please send me a pointer to the one that you have found to be the most accurate and trouble-free?
The versions I need are Asterisk 1.8.15 and FreePBX 2.10.1.9. Why those versions specifically, and no others? Because while I would love to be able to upgrade the entire system to the latest and the greatest, I have never, ever been able to find a way to do that that does not trash my FreePBX installation. Even just doing a “yum update” on the base CentOS 5.8 installation trashes FreePBX… fortunately I discovered this while working with one of my throwaway VMs so no permanent damage was done.
Why Debian 6 / Squeeze specifically? Because out of several distros I tried in VMware and VirtualBox VMs… Debian 6/7, CentOS 5.8/5.9/6.4, Lubuntu (“Lightweight Ubuntu”) 13.04, Kubuntu (“KDE Ubuntu”, I forget the version number)… Debian 6 seems the least intrusive and piggish on host system resources; when idle it’s running about 2.5 percent of CPU on the host vs about 7 percent for Lubuntu and 18 percent for CentOS 5.8 even after I put “divide=10” into the boot parameters. In each case, the OS was running in text mode, no GUI. (Incidentally, in case there is interest here, VMware Player and VirtualBox seem comparable in this regard, with no clear reason, so far, to prefer one over the other.)
So, if you all could please point me to the “correct” way (among all the marginally-correct and flat out incorrect ways) of installing on Debian 6 I would be most grateful.
do all the dependencies with apt-get, decide if you want Debian’s default apache layout or the CentOS/FreePBX one, i.e. where webroot will be and who will be the owner of the process, add the asterisk user to sudoers if you choice to leave the debian defaults. Modify /etc/apache2/* to achieve all the above.
Choose the version of asterisk and dahdi you want before you download it , (be careful to qualify exactly what you want download and how to changedir into it after untarring)
When you do the make menuselect add the mysql dependencies on the first page (depracated section) if you want mysqlcdr’s to work.
Download Freepbx, here is the trick to getting it to work, READ IT, there are quite a few directives that can be overridden with commandline options :-
./install_amp -h
particularly --webroot /www/yourpreviouschoice and --force-version 2.10 in your case. But knowledge of the other available overrides will give you insight as to how the script works and why it might fail in your case.
DO NOT try and use the debian based .deb packages for asterisk or dahdi!!
DO read and understand the nuances of apache2’s a2ensite a2dissite etc.
Some more notes as we are not allowedto edit our posts
On 32/64 bit installs, If you think you need 64 bit code (few do), Perhaps look into debian 7.0 + multiarch deployment rather than the straight 64 bit one, the library locations have been a little flaky in the past, the multiarch concept should mitigate that problem.
To save a step on that link, The extra sounds can be also installed by make menuselect.
What is “Ubuntu Wheezy?”
Good luck it works very well once you get a handle on it.
