As you may or may not know, Nerd Vittles has come out with their new “PBX in a Flash”, which includes FreePBX - see http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=194
This is supposed to be a break from Trixbox, but the thought occurs to me that they may still be doing things their own way. So I would really be interested to know, if anyone tries “PBX in a Flash”, whether it breaks anything in FreePBX or causes any weirdness in the way things are supposed to operate. I know that one of the complaints about Trixbox was that they did things their own way, which sometimes caused problems in FreePBX. But, I’m not so sure that this new distribution won’t repeat that mistake, until some user reports have come in.
Without having actually tried it, I tend to be more impressed by Elastix than by the Nerd Vittles distro, but then I guess it’s not really fair to compare the two yet because today is day one for “PBX in a Flash” (sure wish they’d used a shorter name), while Elastix has been around for a while. Still, my initial perception is that Elastix is the more professional, polished distribution. So, I’d be interested in hearing opinions from actual users.
I have currently installed this distro on a dev box here in the office. So far, so good. It’s not bloated and everything seems to work without problems. FreePBX seems to play well with the distro as updating modules and such works without incident. Of course, you still have to use firefox or motzilla or FreePBX CSS screws up. I’m currently installing a2billing for kicks via their script…i’ll post the outcome of that later.
So far, so good for me as of today, my first full day of using it.
The reason most folks are excited about PBXiaF is due to Ward Mundy and the crew of folks that he’s assembled to assist in this effort. Tom King for example.
Ward is known, in my opinion, to be a tinkerer and phone phreak kind of guy. He loves messing around with this stuff and is constantly coming out with new scripts to make Asterisk and FreePBX sing. Plus he’s a good writer.
His posts on his nerdvittles.com site are detailed, and he has a passion to go back and make thing right when errors or less-than-clear examples are used, so that his instructions are bulletproof.
It took balls to break away from Trixbox. Well done! I expect we will see the open and contributory environment people want from PBXiaF. It appears Ward also has some commercial interests with a hosting approach to all this, but as long as it’s all transparent and freely available in all versions, I don’t see how you can go wrong with PBXiaF. It is just going to get better.
Just to dispel any myths about a get-rich-quick scheme at Nerd Vittles, let me assure you that we’re still needy nerds and probably always will be. Our total return on the Nerd Vittles project in three years is well under $1,000. The monthly return works out to a little less than I made on my lemonade stand 50 years ago. Of course, my mother paid for the sugar and the lemons.
We do plan to offer both managed and hosted options for PBX in a Flash, but those options are purely voluntary on the user’s part. The only difference in the products will be better peace of mind and a better Internet connection (2 ms off the Internet backbone). Unlike some other offerings in the marketplace, our software on all the platforms will be identical to the stand-alone (free) version except for monitoring services and automatic backups which is what you’re paying for. And, of course, you will be able to migrate back to the stand-alone product should you ever decide you want to do that.
We’re on Day #3 with PBX in a Flash. There already have been over 3,000 downloads, and that doesn’t include the torrents which are screaming fast. So far, so good from our vantage point as well. There’s been one trivial bug report which would qualify as about a 1.5 on a scale of 1 to 10. It was addressed in under an hour. So give PBX in a Flash a whirl. I think it will remind you of the good old days in the Asterisk development community. It’s a project that belongs to all of us. We were merely the aggregators that sought a more stable, reliable development platform for the Asterisk and FreePBX development community. All of the source including the install scripts is freely available. Much of the thanks for the stability and ease of use, of course, goes directly to the FreePBX development team which has done an incredible job on its latest release!
PBXiaF and CentPBX. I have VM’s running of both. My first thought is that they are both quite good out of the gate. I was however immediately impressed with the new FreePBX modules in PBXiaF. The config edit and PHPMyAdmin in a FreePBX frame is nice.
Time will tell. Since, I normally add some Vittles to my installs I am kinda exited about those parts being installed via scripts.
So far it does not appear that either distro breaks FreePBX. Since PBXiaF uses the Administrators module and some new modules I am not so sure changing the defaults is as easy (compared to trixbox.)
More later.
Robert
The modules are only links to stuff that has been put in the maint directory and displayed in an Iframe, mostly so it can be protected under .htaccess.
FreePBX have gone to a lot of trouble to make a nice looking interface - although I have still got doubts about the toad - si o it seems a shame not to use it;-)
if you don’t want to use the administrators module, then you can change this in amportal, but you will have to provide some .htaccess protection for the admin directory - look in /etc/pbx/httpd to see where you can change this.