hi all,
i have successfully moved from trixbox to freepbx distro (manually) and have a couple thoughts:
freepbx has indicated a desire to be more security oriented than trixbox
-freepbx rpms are unsigned – a simple upstream dns hack could have a freepbx system completely compromised in a matter of minutes. please create a key and sign your rpms.
-the freepbx yum configuration has the “base” and “updates” repositories pointing to the freebpx distro mirror list and not the mirror list from centos-5. further, the updates repository has not been updated itself, therefore, a freepbx installed host is not updated with the latest centos-5 rpms. a freepbx distro host could be compromised as it is not installing available updates and base o/s security bugs and fixes. obviously, if a freepbx host grabs an updated kernel, and kernel specific rpms have not been updated, the host could be rendered useless for voip. building new dahdi rpms based on new kernel source is not that difficult. imho, the host should be kept up2date with all centos-5 rpms.
-the freepbx web configuration doesn’t have ssl in use – i.e. one must use http://freepbx.host.com to access the configuration pages. its nice to have the install screen allow for custom passwords, however all those passwords can be sniffed in a heartbeat due to a non-encrypted/non-ssl connection to the host. freepbx should generate a self-signed cert and default to https:// for the web configuration pages
grabbing lots of unhappy trixbox users
-it is clearly in the interest of the success of your project to provide a simple migration tool to get users from trixbox over to freepbx. as each of these use centos-5, it is entirely possible to do an in-place replacement – sqldump the data, remove the trixbox rpms, change the yum repo pointers, install the new asterisk/freepbx rpms, import the data, and voila. i do not have the programming skills to do this, but would contribute to a bounty to have the work completed.
grabbing even more users
-a “skinny” extension type (in the drop down list) would be a huge step forward in gaining a lot of traction from pbx managers using proprietary voip platforms. cisco ip phones were designed to run skinny and run skinny better than sip. additionally, skinny is faster and gives access to wide range of xml components that are unavailable using sip firmware.
in this thread
http://www.freepbx.org/forum/freepbx/users/patch-for-h323-mgcp-skinny-extensions
a user kindly provided a patch to do as described above. can anyone comment with precision about using freepbx distro and skinny based phones?
freepbx distro could emerge as the best pbx distro and i hope that it does.
cheers
m