I have been running FreePBX for a few years now, and I am surprised every day how stable and feature rich it is. It is so stable that it keeps on running and I don’t even take a look at it for weeks and months. Kudos to everybody who is involved with this.
A few days ago I was prompted by my SIP provider that they were retiring the server I was using, and to switch to another server. That required that I switched to PJSIP, and that required a bunch of updates. So, right now the system I am running is FreePBX 12.0.76.6 with Asterisk (Ver. 13.9.1) on Centos, and FreePBX tells me that the support of PJSIP is experimental. So far, though, it has worked fine.
On the other hand, I think it may be time to switch to a newer version, but I don’t really know how. I had to hunt for a while on the web to find how to install Asterisk 13 for the PJSIP support, but I don’t have a clue how to upgrade my system to a newer version of FreePBX and Asterisk, without having to start from scratch and having to configure everything again (which is not really what I am looking to do). What is actually the latest freePBX version available? And can I upgrade from my current version? Will that automatically upgrade Astereisk? If not, what is the correct order to do this?
Latest FreePBX version is 15, which happily for you is the first version that supports restore from legacy backup. IMO your most painless way forward is to:
set up a new FreePBX Distro system using FreePBX 15/Asterisk 16
take a backup of the old system
restore the backup on the new system
This gives you a fairly comfortable window to test new features while your existing system soldiers on, as well as a platform on which you can test pjsip. If spare hardware for a new server install is not at hand, you can get an instance at Vultr (or any of its kin) for a few pesos a month.
mike_b, I’ll bet you were using Flowroute their Nevada server. IMHO sip is sip, pjsip is just a better version. But for a couple of my family users PJSIP was just “too much” for them and they just transitioned to the new POPS with plain old SIP. There was no real need to mess them up with something “new”, (PJSIP, it’s not new but to them it would be foreign). So using sip registration. FYI, I moved PJSIP years ago and glad I did. Just saying for whatever it’s worth.
This will cause them to miss inbound calls that are not routed through the pop of their choice. Flowroute will not guarantee that inbound calls will go through the pop of your choice.
We did specify on the Flowroute accounts what our preferred POP is, something which is mandatory. Also all IPs are properly forwarded to the PBX. So far so good but I’ll be keeping my on FreePBX CDRs as well as what Flowroute has and comparing them.
Thanks everybody. I think I will try what Lorne suggested. the hardware I am using is a couple of years old, so that should be OK. I think I will try it this way:
close the current drive and check clone to work.
Make a full backup of current system
Install the new distro
restore backup from 2)
Hopefully that will be OK? If something fails, I should be able to go back to the clone…
Questions:
I obviously can’t backup from the local drive (as that will be overridden by the new distro). How do I transfer the backup somewhere else, so I can load it then in step 4?
I assume that the trunk configuration will also be transferred, as will the entire phone system (Extensions, IVRs, etc.), right?
At the moment I am using a PJSIP trunk, but the extensions are all SIP. Is that OK, or do I need to convert them also. Does that require new hardware (phones)? They only seem to refer to SIP in their setup pages.
I am actually not really clear where the Asterisk stops and Freepbx starts (or the other way round). I ran a backup from Freepbx, and I can find it in the /var/spool/asterisk/backup folder. So, I assume this then backs up all settings for freepbx and asterisk? I sometimes see that to set certain things people aare asked to modify some configuration files. Are those also backed up and transferred when the backup is restored to a new system?
Correct. When you run a full backup, all PBX settings are included in the tarball. You can also opt to include voicemail, system recordings, cdrs etc. which will also be transferred.
It is perfectly fine to have a mix of chan_sip and pjsip extensions/trunks, they work fine together.
I thought the backup / restore across versions only works for v13 or v14 to v15.
Excerpt from Backup Restore info:
“FreePBX 15 backup also allows you to restore from legacy backups. This means that people can take a backup from an older version of FreePBX (specifically versions 13 and 14) and restore to a FreePBX 15 system.”
This person is trying to go from v12 to v15. Will this work?
There are backup 15 module improvements coming out frequently. At this point, I would recommend upgrading the backup module on the new 15 system to edge before the restore.
[root@pbx ~]# grep "Module: backup Updated" /var/log/asterisk/freepbx.log*
/var/log/asterisk/freepbx.log:[2020-Jun-15 08:13:15] [freepbx.INFO]: Module: backup Updated to version 15.0.10.7 [] []
/var/log/asterisk/freepbx.log:[2020-Jun-16 08:53:14] [freepbx.INFO]: Module: backup Updated to version 15.0.10.8 [] []
/var/log/asterisk/freepbx.log:[2020-Jun-17 06:17:24] [freepbx.INFO]: Module: backup Updated to version 15.0.10.9 [] []
/var/log/asterisk/freepbx.log:[2020-Jun-22 09:07:27] [freepbx.INFO]: Module: backup Updated to version 15.0.10.10 [] []
/var/log/asterisk/freepbx.log:[2020-Jun-23 06:30:21] [freepbx.INFO]: Module: backup Updated to version 15.0.10.11 [] []
/var/log/asterisk/freepbx.log:[2020-Jun-24 06:30:20] [freepbx.INFO]: Module: backup Updated to version 15.0.10.12 [] []
I submitted a bunch of bug reports a couple months ago after trying to migrate a client from 2.11 to 15 this way. After those were closed, I did successfully migrate the client a few weeks ago.
Thanks, everybody. I installed the latest distro on a new HD and it booted up fine. I may have made a mistake as it booted up with DHCP, but that was a relatively easy fix. I then opened the FreePBX control page, went through the setup there, and got to the restore page. I uploaded the last full backup from the old system then. It took the system a while to get though the restore, and it ended up with an orange bar, indicating an error, but the page said that the restore had been competed successfully. I rebooted the system and way and behold:
IT WORKS
So, Kudos to everybody here.
Now, I have run into a couple of issues, and perhaps someone has an idea:
The voice mail didn’t work for the phones. But looking at the extensions, I notices that the voicemal was disabled. Enabling it works on some extensions, but not all. I figured that could be a configuration error and tried to look at the UCP, but when I click on that I get an error message:
Exception: Please ask for a valid directory.
I googled around a bit, and one suggestion was to disable the “pms” module. But there is nothing like that in the module manager. So, that is the first thing I need to find out, how to get into the UCP.
Voice mail is enabled, I have defined an email address, but no notices are showing up in my email. Are there more settings I have to make to enable sending emails?
Again, thank you for all the good help. REALLY appreciate it.