Rant: What's the problem with EL7/8/9?

“Clearly the FreePBX distro is good, for people to purchase support.”

I haven’t purchased support in nearly two decades (I think it was Trixbox at the beginning)…I never purchased support. I am just a user and currently have 6 freePBX systems (local, no cloud) running. The current FreePBX 15/16 distro is extremely reliable and it is free. You have to spend some time though…to understand the concept and to configure it properly.

I love the “I don’t have that issue”.

Just because you don’t have the issue, doesn’t mean others are not having it. In fact, if you search around the forum there are tons of publications regarding this. I’ve even taken a screenshot where another user already listed a bunch of topics on the subject:

Since you have no issues, maybe it would be interesting to help those users, as someone mentioned above “documentation for what, there’s a forum”.

I do agree that the OSS freepbx is alright, my rant was about the poor documentation, missing documentation, bad practice disabling selinux documentation, only debian distros documentation, so on.

@Charles_Darwin

The current FreePBX 15/16 distro is extremely reliable and it is free.

So reliable that on the initial setup you get locked out and have to reboot around three or four times just to get through the responsible firewall wizard.
It’s so reliable that you can’t even choose a proper keyboard layout during setup.
(yes you can easily do it afterwards with localectl, but I mean, really?)

That’s the problem…you just complained and did not describe the issue in a proper way. If you configure the firewall properly during the initial setup (there’s even a wizard), you do not get locked out.
If you didn’t do anything wrong, then maybe it would be interesting, where you clicked in the firewall wizard and what settings you decided to use.
It may well be that the firewall wizard does not work for you, but you have to describe your scenario and what you did… :wink:
Regarding the keyboard layout…now I got you…are you European? Yes, that’s true…freePBX is not fully compatible (out-of-the-box) with the non-anglosaxon world. I know it, I speak German…

EDIT: you can see the keyboard layout, you can click on it, but you cannot change it…during the initial setup of a FreePBX distro…that’s true :wink:

Man I literally downloaded the FreePBX distro, put it running on a VM and got locked down on the wizard.
Repeated the whole process twice to be sure before posting about it.

Then you come and say “there’s even a wizard” man, just … lol :man_facepalming:

I’m not asking questions I can get my way around this (actually by yesterday). I made a rant about lack of documentation and it being targeted at a specific linux distribution only.

For someone above who said they don’t know many OSS projects with good documentation, surely they’re looking at the wrong OSS projects.
I could go with xcp-ng, gitlab, ELK, docker, git, some that struck to mind in a zippy oh openshift, ansible, chef, everything properly documented.

Again…what settings did you apply (firewall wizard)?

Those recommended by the wizard itself. iirc whitelisted my machine ip and the local network.
which clearly failed, since got locked out.

I appreciate your intent but really don’t waste your time on this. This bloated distro is not something we are going to use (and by that, this wannabe firewall thing as well). I installed it simply to look at it. Done and done.

Was your virtual machine in a different subnet? In Virtualbox I use network bridge instead of NAT…

Bridged, same subnet, with static mappings, only allowed clients get connectivity.

I just set up a new freePBX 16 system two weeks ago. Virtualbox network bridge. I experienced a temporary crash during the firewall setup, once I confirmed the default settings, but everything worked well afterwards.
I connected two phones to the system, a Sangoma P370 and a s705. This is just for testing. I cannot confirm your description of the problem…sorry…

I chose FreePBX 16 and Asterisk 19 from the setup menu.
So you experienced a temporary crash. So can you describe it? How did you solve it? Why you call it temporary?
I can call it a temporary crash as well, basically the browser throws errors from the cached JS trying to do something when access to the system was lost. Reboot, regain access. Just in my situation wasn’t only once, it was at least three times, until the freepbx went pass that wizard.

What you describe, could well be an issue. I could not reproduce my problem. It was an Ajax error during the initial firewall setup.

I installed a new system at another location, but did not see the error…

Yes that’s the issue. “Ajax related error” it’s not really Ajax is just because the browser lost connection to the server.

Another anecdotal situation on one of our test instances we’re playing with - we’re mostly messing with freepbx and selinux at this point. We’ve collected a set of rules and applying it to a new install.
This is the setup process:

[root@pbx freepbx]# sudo ./start_asterisk start


STARTING ASTERISK
Asterisk Started
[root@pbx freepbx]# sudo ./install --webroot=/var/www/html -n --dbuser root --dbpass ---
Assuming you are Database Root
Checking if SELinux is enabled...Error!
SELinux is enabled.  Please disable SELinux before installing FreePBX.
[root@pbx freepbx]# setenforce 0
[root@pbx freepbx]# sudo ./install --webroot=/var/www/html -n --dbuser root --dbpass ---
Assuming you are Database Root
Checking if SELinux is enabled...Its not (good)!
Reading /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf...Done
Checking if Asterisk is running and we can talk to it as the 'asterisk' user...Error!
Error communicating with Asterisk.  Ensure that Asterisk is properly installed and running as the asterisk user
Asterisk appears to be running as asterisk
Try starting Asterisk with the './start_asterisk start' command in this directory
[root@pbx freepbx]# sudo ./start_asterisk start


STARTING ASTERISK
Asterisk is already running

:rofl:

Well…a reload of the page in your browser fixes it. You don’t need to restart the freePBX server. That explains why you got locked out.
I guess someone would have to file a bug report… :wink:

https://issues.freepbx.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa

I couldn’t SSH to the machine either, so your assumption of browser only is wrong. Yes, VB emulates a console so you can access it that way, that’s a last resort access to a system.

But if the reload in the browser fixes the SSH connection … that’s a new one. Never would have thought of that - but I’m not going to do it again either, spent enough time on this.

You know, this thread is becoming a typical, user has issues then user rants about how FreePBX sucks and it is all FreePBX’s fault this is happening followed by showing us continually that they haven’t read or understood the documentation. At some level too, not really understand how FreePBX works.

Right now we only see the FreePBX part of the manual install, we have no idea if the Asterisk part was installed properly. Based on the fact that documentation hasn’t been understood properly or followed properly (nothing in the instructions wants installing done via sudo commands) there is a pretty good chance that Asterisk isn’t being installed right. Things could be missing, Asterisk modules not loading right, etc.

Of course since the FreePBX documentation seems to be hard to follow the next question is was any of the Asterisk stuff read up on? As of Asterisk v16 and v17 things where removed from the standard install (because they were being completely removed in v19 or upcoming in v21). So unless that was accounted for there could be parts of Asterisk not installed/complied that FreePBX is still looking for (that crappy distro OS does it for you).

At this point there is nothing here showing that either Asterisk or FreePBX has been installed correctly. It all points to a PEBCAK problem.

1 Like

the usage of the sudo in the above example was preceded by the same commands without sudo.
you got to update your slang, it’s a layer8 problem these days.

None of this changes my comment. Still have no idea if you installed things correctly.

Yeah, its a user problem.

Right here for example:

[root@pbx ~]# fwconsole ma refreshsignatures
Getting Data from Online Server...

In modulefunctions.class.php line 454:
                                                                                 
  implode(): Passing glue string after array is deprecated. Swap the parameters  
                                                                                 

moduleadmin [-f|--force] [-d|--debug] [--edge] [--ignorecache] [--stable] [--color] [--skipchown] [-e|--autoenable] [--skipdisabled] [--snapshot SNAPSHOT] [--format FORMAT] [-R|--repo REPO] [-t|--tag TAG] [--skipbreakingcheck] [--sendemail] [--onlystdout] [--] [<args>]...

[root@pbx ~]# php -v
PHP 7.4.30 (cli) (built: Jun  7 2022 08:38:19) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.4.30, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

has nothing to do with Asterisk. Only poor outdated code, which seems heavily present here.

What version of FreePBX and Asterisk are being used? Those details have been missing.

This instance in particular, from where these errors come from:

[root@pbx ~]# asterisk -V
Asterisk 19.5.0
[root@pbx freepbx]# amportal a ma list | grep framework
| framework        | 15.0.23    | Enabled                           | GPLv2+  |