Moving from Trixbox

Greetings all. I’m moving our phone system from Trixbox to the FreePBX Distro. Where are backups stored by default on FreePBX Distro?

/var/lib/asterisk/backups

You can’t load backups between versions.

Its not as easy as it sounds - I have just completed a migration and after looking at it in depth I decided the only practical way was to make a fresh start. To make this as painless as possible I loaded the latest version of the FPBX Distro onto an old laptop I had lying around and built a new system on the laptop that mirrored the old Trixbox install. It was tedious having to enter extension details and passwords, to copy over system recordings, voice mail greetings etc. etc. But after a lot of sweat and toil I was satisfied it was as right as it could be and I made a full backup of the system.

I then loaded the same Distro version onto the server that had the old Trixbox system on it as that was to host the new system and restored the backup to it and I immediately had a working system with a few minor glitches. The biggest glitch I had was that the Emergency CID on each extension was there but was not being seen when calls were routed. I discovered that I had to re-save each extension individually after which everything came right. The other thing was that CDR’s were not working, this was due to the mysql password on the laptop being migrated to the new system which had been given a new mysql password when it was installed. I needed to look in amportal.conf for the password (it’s almost at the end) and then replaced the migrated password in /etc/asterisk/cdr_msql.conf with the password from /etc/amportal.conf and after restarting asterisk all was well.

Dahdi was also not quite right so make sure you have copies of /etc/dahdi/system.conf and of /etc/asterisk/chan_dahdi.conf and its associated files so you can restore those, then it just needs a dahdi restart and you are in business.

It was time consuming and tedious but the result was worth the effort, I now have something that is properly supported and thanks to Tony Lewis will upgrade easily as things develop.

One other thing I was using a Digium analogue card. When everything came up I had bad echo. Dmesg showed that the firmware had not loaded into the hardware echo canceler, it appears the older cancelers have a problem with newer Dahdi versions. The quick fix was to remove the echo canceller module and do a fxotune, with that the software canceller coped well and removed the echo. The long term fix was to swop out the old module for a new module with Digium.

Yeah, luckily, I have a separate box I’ve installed the FreePBX Distro on. I can take my time getting it working right (hopefully) before actually converting to it. My (very outdated) Trixbox is handing the job fine.

Actually, FreePBX 2.5 backups (from trixbox 2.8.0.4) seem to restore nicely to FreePBX 2.9 (from distro version 1.87.29.55-2)

No, they don’t. Inbound routes and IVR’s don’t work for sure.