I understand there’s no direct upgrade path between these two due to the CentOS issue. But with 1.8xx at EOL and support coming to an end in the next six months, we need to start planning to move to the 1.11xx track.
Having already endured a loss of all recorded audio in a move from a VM to a physical box earlier this year, we’d like to avoid a recurrence. Is it possible to restore to 1.11xx from a 1.8xx backup and avoid a complete system reconfig and loss of recordings?
Well we use the backup and restore module in FreePBX 2.10 weekly with no issues since the bugs were worked out. It should work fine for you.
Does that mean a backup from the 1.8xx track can be restored to the 1.11xx track? Excuse my ignorance; I don’t know if the data are compatible (i.e. a backuup of an Exchange 2007 data store cannot be restored to an Exchange 2010 server).
Thanks!
Yes the backup data is fine as FreePBX handles the dialplan for 1.8 and 11 so it will take care of it all.
This is off-topic, but I’ve just check our backup and it apparently stopped working in September. It was running each and copying to an FTP server. It looks like it might have quit after a module update. It runs without reporting an error:
Saving Backup 3…Intializing Backup 3
Backup Lock acquired!
Running pre-backup hooks…
Adding items…
/bin/tar: Removing leading /' from member names /bin/tar: Removing leading/’ from member names
/bin/tar: Removing leading /' from member names /bin/tar: Removing leading/’ from member names
/bin/tar: Removing leading /' from member names /bin/tar: Removing leading/’ from member names
Bulding manifest…
Creating backup…
Storing backup…
Running post-backup hooks…
Backup successfully completed!
done!
But the file never appears in the FTP folder.
Here’s the log from the FTP server (domain name changed):
2012-11-08 00:57:02 10.90.2.251 - 10.90.2.254 21 USER domain\freepbxbackup 331 0 0 45f5a0ce-afca-4407-a251-a97a4bd6996e -
2012-11-08 00:57:02 10.90.2.251 - 10.90.2.254 21 PASS *** 530 1326 41 45f5a0ce-afca-4407-a251-a97a4bd6996e -
2012-11-08 00:57:02 10.90.2.251 - 10.90.2.254 21 ControlChannelClosed - - 0 0 45f5a0ce-afca-4407-a251-a97a4bd6996e -
FTP backup issue resovled. IIS site port conflict. Sorry for the false alarm!
Wow,you all over the board bringing up that you lost your audio.
That is an odd occurrence. Audio is just files and to make it simple that are zipped up and put in the archive.
You had so many options. You could have scp’d or rsync’d the directories between the new and old machine if indeed something went south in the restore.
Did you look inside the archive manually and see I your audio was there?
I would not want to give lurkers the impression that the system is that fragile, it is not.
Lastly please consider FreePBX support team for these types of situations. That’s what it is for.
I try to restore a backup from a previous version ( 1.817.210.58 ) in new track Stable-1.1010.210.62 but when I restore the web manager not responding and get a blank page. How can i get the same configuration on new installation?
thanks
Not sure without seeing any logs on the system you restore to.
The backup/failover system was broken when I did this work last summer. There were multiple updates posted for the backup module after I posted about the problems, and I am not the first to report the SQL password problem after a restore. I inquired about the process to do a backup/restore before starting the work and the need to reset the SQL password did not come up; I was told in advance to just backup/restore and everything would just work (much like the above posts that say I can simply backup our older version to a newer version).
I would definitely charactize the software as problematic/finicky. As noted above, if the FTP site isn’t functioning properly the backup module does NOT report a failure- it runs and reports success, even though it was unable to upload the file.
The End Point Configuration Manager, which initially worked to provision phones, now isn’t. This is an issue many others have reported. I haven’t begun to deal with that because at this point we’ve put rollout on hold due to the myriad of ongoing issues.
The FreePBX support team may be great, but they are expensive and I have an ethical issue with paying for support when the primary cause of the problem is a software defect. When we had an issue with a Comcast PRI, we were told by Tony that this is common with Comcast and there was no known fix. It turned out that there was a simple fix, it just took some digging and persistence to get the right person at Comcast involved to implement it. Of the vendors involved, only Digium jumped in and was fully engaged in finding a solution/helping.
I’ve been reminded/lectured here about my expectations for ‘free’ software being unreasonable and even chidingly asked if I felt like I wasn’t “getting my money’s worth” from this free software. My point in posting all this is not to complain about value, but to try to spell out the sort of issues that discourage the SMB sector from considering the software. A hobbyist will tinker to get things to work. A harried SMB SysAdmin just needs things to work, particularly a phone system.
If you are doing a backup and restore to a new machine and the new machine has a different MySQL password then in your backup job remove the line that says it is backing up the /etc/freepbx.conf since that is where the MySQL information is stored.
FreePBX is complicated and by nature so are phone systems that it takes a understanding of how the whole LAMP stack and linux works to be a admin of a phone system. That is the simple truth.
As far as EPM we use it daily in support and it works great so not sure what your problem is but I suggest you open bug reports on things. That is why we have a bug track
Same with your FTP comments. I would open a bug reporting what the issue is. Please open bug reports on what exactly your problems are and steps to reproduce them or they will never get fixed.
Thanks
I created a bug/feature requesting we do not include freepbx.conf by default when using the full template in backup to make it easier for users.
#6083
I am sorry if you find the software buggy. Reviewing the daily bug fixes and pushes I think the team does a gear job.
My firm is responsible for 1000’s of seats of FreePBX. Users from medium enterprise to education and government. I don’t think they would accept buggy software.
If the 6000 or so installs a month our attrition is always reasonable (never over 5%).
I hope you document and address your issues, rerun your test plan and get the project back on track.
As far as Digium jumping in to assist. If it was a Digium PRI card it’s their software and their product. Whom else should have approached it. I ask because your statement implies a lack of diligence on Tony’s part.
I know the team cares deeply about releasing quality software.
It wasn’t clear where the issue was, as is often the case in this sort of situation. Digits/tones were getting dropped after being pushed on the phones. Comcast initially said “Not us”. Tony reported it was an issue with Comcast PRIs that he’d not ever been able to resolve. Digium jumped in and engaged in finding and fixing the problem. I’m not trying to dump on anyone, I’m saying that these are the sorts of things that prevent wider adoption.
As a business owner, I would love to be deploying FreePBX at every customer. And while I certainly anticipated some learning curve issues with the first install, the curve has been a year long and still going and we’ve eaten dozens and dozens of unbillable hours. After we got the call quality issues fixed by switching from SIP trunks to a PRI (and solving that subsequent problem), we were ready to move forward with other clients. But the very next phone we tried to deploy (and the first new one since startup) didn’t work and we’ve not been able to make it work. Really, I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick the darn football.
Tony-
How it currently works wouldn’t be a problem if how it currently works was documented along with the solution. As-is, what should have taken five minutes took hours because we had to first try to figure out why it wasn’t working, then try to find a fix.
I specifically asked in advance about the process and this step was never mentioned. I guess that’s really the source of my frustration- there’s been a painful and expensive amount of what seems like avoidable ‘learning the hard way’.
If I only could find more people to write documentation. FreePBX has always lacked this and developers do not write documentation so the community needs to step up and start help keeping the wiki and documentation updated.
I work 18 hour days already and so do most other people in this project we just do not have the time. How was I to know that you are setting up mySQL on each box with different passwords.
Its opensouce and all the code is there for everyone to read. The best documentation is reading the source code.
All commercial modules are well documented in the Schmooze knowledge base since the code is not readable being closed source but I do not have the time to do this for everything opensource in FreePBX. Sorry
If you are serious about getting into the resale business you should talk to Preston over at Schmooze.
Here is my experience:
Very short background. ISP since 1998, decent local network. Repositioned dial in POPS as VoIP gateways and started to offer voice service on a Sylantro switch. Needed a customer prem solution and started investigating Asterisk in 2004.
Started as you did deploying in house and then to friendly users. Moved from LG MGCP phones (shared line appearances almost 10 years ago!) to Polycom 500 then finally Aastra.
First commercial customer, car dealership. 80 phones or so. Ended up buying them back and paying to installing an Iwatsu. About 100k lesson.
Continued to hunker down, became part of trixbox community. Wrote an untrixbox script and setup our own repository.
This worked for a couple of years. We had centralized backup and management and grew to about 1000 extensons.
trixbox forked FreePBX we started looking for new solution.
Attended OTTS training. Met and developed a relationship with Tony. Initially engaged Schmooze as tier 3 support.
Last year we installed a Schmooze PBXact hosted platform for resellers. Instead of spending our time chasing bugs we can focus on customer service and sales.
For my business it was the best decision I ever made.
Certainly a model can be built on the Open Source software. I strongly suggest you attend the Naples OTTS and become part of the reseller community.
I also am disappointed you could not get your SIP trunks to work. Utilizing packet trunking is a large chunk of the ROI on a VoIP system. With proper QoS packet trunks work great.
Hope this gives you some next step ideas.
Clearly we miscommunicated on that change: I had an existing install running in a VM. We had to move it to a physical box to accomodate a PRI card. Both were installed from the distro which automatically sets up MySQL and sets the passwords. I had no way of knowing the passwords would be different, nor any way of knowing why it wasn’t working after the backup/restore.
It sucks that you are working 18 hours/day. I know it’s largely thankless work as few think to come here and post when things work well, just when things don’t.