OSS editor not working and I am struggling to find the copy of the $mac.cfg file to be able to edit it.
The fact that there is no entry level endpoint manager for FreePBX is a gap in the package. For small single vendor installations there is low motivation for a comprehensive multi-vendor managed endpoint tool.
Is there some solution which would make sense?
Are we talking of something for a hobbyist or a business?
For a business,
$75, even if it was per year, is not much to pay for the time you save…
Even the scroogest of my past or current employers would pay this because they would understand you save time and time is money…
For a hobbyist it’s a little costly but then you could set them manually (or learn to provision them by hand)…
Have a nice day,
Nick
PS: Before you ask, I don’t work for Sangoma… It’s just that I know that the time I would save using this would amply pay for the price of the module…
Agree with Nick, the EPM is peanuts for the value provided. Less than a single billable hour.
What is the OSS editor? FreePBX has the free config edit module,.
Secondly FreePBX never had a EPM. The OSS one was community supported from day 1 and built by the community. The commercial one was a product Schmooze had 7 years ago for their PBXact PBX only and due to community begging for us to release it as a paid module we did. That was 5 years ago.
2 years ago when I had to do some major number crunching on what our cost were in things EPM alone had over a 750K cost into that module. Now days it would be well over 1M USD. So asking for 75.00 to use it is a small fee.
I get it. I own a license to the EPM. I never got around to trying it out as the OSS was doing what I needed. When the reoccurring fee came along, I just let it sit. Now with the problems with OSS I will probably have to go through the port and learning curve to use EPM and pay the additional fee over and above what I paid previously.
None of this changes my mind that FreePBX needs a base level version of EPM with an ability to easily manually install and provision a few device types, in may case about 8 Aastra phones of 2 models. It would also introduce the EPM environment and make it easy to expand into the full license/support mode.
I bring this up because I think it is a good idea, not because I can’t afford the EPM.
As has been previously mentioned the OSS one is community maintained and is actively being maintained by a community member. You or anyone else is welcome to submit patches or code to improve functionality just as the community member who is maintaining it has been doing. There is no expectation of this module going away. The current maintainer may find that it fits his needs perfectly and no longer work on it while that is the case. In this situation someone else could pickup the ball and run with it. That is the beauty of open source. Any functionality that is important to you you can make happen. Another great example of this is the SCCP module. That is maintained by 1 guy who needs it for what he does and shares it with everyone else.
Today, over 200 million apps and web sites run on PHP, which is used by an estimated 5 million developers. PHP is among the most popular languages for corporate web development, sometimes referred to as “Internet English”. It is the most frequent choice for the backend of cloud applications;
The above is from Zend the maintainers of the PHP project. Even if you’re not a developer there are over 5 million out there who can do what you want 
If PHP supported only sequential file data and which fell behind the current versions from time to time, and some company created a comprehensive data package for licensing, would you blame anyone for believing PHP was not yet complete as an open platform?
PS: I get the cost of development and support issue for EPM.
So your argument for not contributing code or hiring someone on your behalf to contribute code to make “FREE” software do what you want is a philosophical difference with the programming language it is written in because you don’t feel it is “FREE” enough to use yet the code you are using all runs on that language.
slowly backs away
The actual answer to my post is “Humm, Interesting. Not sure whether any solution is likely soon as OSS is supported by an outside contributor, but I will pass your point along when the opportunity arises”. Much easier. 
We purchased EPM, and it has been very worthwhile. I will say, however, that there are a couple of use cases where I have found the current licensing model to be an impediment.
The first is being able to try it out before purchase. When we were evaluating options for a new phone system a couple of years ago, we were able to trial most of what we wanted with FreePBX for free, but not the EPM. Given that we were already on an Asterisk based system, and that we were already needing to generate our own configuration files for some of our endpoints, this ended up not being a huge deal for us, but if we were coming to Asterisk and FreePBX without that background, we would have been much more likely to keep looking.
The second is being able to set up test systems to try out new versions or configurations. For most of the servers that I run, I build up test servers, try a bunch of stuff, and then kill them. With FreePBX I can do that with the free modules, but it doesn’t work well with the paid modules, especially if I am running them as VMs, and they show up as different hardware each time.
A solution that makes sense to me and would address both of these impediments (although I’m not sure how much work it would be to implement) would be to offer a free version that is capped at a small number of endpoints (5?), and requires a license for anything above that. FWIW, it would even make sense to me if it were priced in endpoint packs; maybe $75 would cover 100 endpoints, and another $75 would cover the next 100 endpoints, etc.
Just my two cents.