I have been running Asterisk and FreePBX (AMP) since the days of A@H.
Currently I am running CentOS 5.3, Asterisk 1.4, Zaptel and FreePBX 2.5 as a production system.
I have been playing with a second system where I had CentOS 5.4, Asterisk 1.6, Dahdi and FreePBX 2.7. Although it was a little tricky, I got Dahdi to work with a clone X100P in Zaptel compatibility mode.(This is a test system, thinking of going with TDM400 in the future).
Now that I have learned a bit more, I want to do a complete (clean) reinstall for production.
What would you recommend, Asterisk 1.4 or 1.6? Zaptel or Dahdi? Any advantages or disadvantages of one over the other?
My goal was to build a functioning PBX w/voicemail and an auto-attendant for a client and one for my company. I did/do not want to be a VoIP guru.
I started with AsteriskNOW, an OpenVox A400P (for FXOs), and a handful of Linksys SPA942 phones. The Asterisk version is 1.5 and I believe the FreePBX is version 2.5 From there I auto-upgraded to FreePBX 2.7 I did have some troubles with the A400P configuration but eventually resolved the issues. I appreciate the whole AsteriskNOW bundle, it seems like a waste of time to build Asterisk manually or on top of your favorite distro - there’s just too many things that can be missed. Initially there’s a lot to VoIP so I’d rather spend my troubleshooting time on the specific issue and not some subsystem/OS/integration issue. It seems like dahdi is the future for Asterisk (any opinions?) so there’s no reason to not go that way.
The new A400P w/4 FXOs was $160 off of eBay, the Linksys phones run a bit over $100 each, new Cisco SPA504 (a 2nd gen replacement for the SPA942) run under $150 delivered.
There are a number of distros that contain an Operating System, Asterisk and FreePBX. My favorite is PBX-in-a-Flash but there are also Trixbox and Elastix to name several in addition to AsteriskNow. I am using PBX in a Flash 1.6, which is running Asterisk 1.6.2.7 with Dahdi 2.3.0, and FreePBX 2.7 all on top of Centos 5.4.
Asterisk 1.6 and Dahdi are pretty mature and debugged at this point. So long as you are using newer analog hardware for your POTS lines or analog stations, you should not have problems. My TDM400 works fine, as does my Astribank.
Based on my experience, I’d recommend moving ahead with Asterisk 1.6.2.x and FreePBX 2.7.
It is still reasonably new and 1.4 is the long term support version - i personally use PIAF 1.4 with Centos 5.3 and Asterisk 1.4, online upgrade to FreePBX 2.7
There is a good and active forum for the PAIF side of things and obviously this forum is good for the FreepBX side.