As part of my upgrade from FreePBX on a Pi, I managed to pick up a cheap Windbox III Ms-9a35 on ebay - totally passive cooled and low power i3. I replaced the internal HDD with a 250G SSD, so now have a totally silent solution.
I set about installing SNG7-PBX-64bit-1904 on this device last weekend, but have struggled with the install a lot.
I opted for the text based install of FreePBX 14 • Linux 7.6 • Asterisk 16 and this simply just would not install. I figured maybe the ISO was damaged so downloaded again and retried to no avail.
I then opted to install FreePBX 14 • Linux 7.6 • Asterisk 13 and after a couple of failed attempts got it to install by basically leaving it alone for a couple of hours.
The issue I’m seeing is that after the initial install the VGA output goes blank, the files are still being copied as can be seen by observing the disk LED & thankfully and LED built into the USB stick I’m using.
Because the VGA is blanked there is no indication that the install has completed and it is all too easy to assume that it has. Subsequently there is no way to determine when to remove the USB and reboot the PC. Get the timing wrong and you end up with a corrupt install and then have to go through the whole process all over.
One more issue I found:
This PC has a gigabit LAN port, during the install, the port lights would go out and the device would drop off the network. I resolved this by forcing the port to 100Mb in the switch.
After that I managed to get FBX14/Asterisk13 installed. I ran out of time last weekend to actually get FreePBX setup & configured so set about that today.
This full-blown FreePBX has a lot more features than the Pi version, so after getting all my extensions, trunks etc configured, I figured I’d have a look at some of the other features (being a natural tinkerer) I found the Network settings in the Admin menu and to my surprise, discovered that FreePBX had found the built-in WiFi on the Windbox. So like some inexperienced school-kid, I allowed it to connected to my WiFi and boom - lost the UI. No amount of rebooting would bring it back online. I then noticed that the port lights had gone out, so FreePBX had somehow disabled the eth0 port and WiFi was not working. By now I was running the Winbox headless, so plugged the VGA back in. Here I was presented with a bunch of errors stating that the firewall config files were corrupt, rebooting in approx 30 seconds, and then simply looping at that point.
The old adage should apply here - ‘If it ain’t broke…’
So now I’m back on another fresh install.
I’m trying FBX14/Asterisk 16 again.
Will keep you posted.