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Some Tips & Tricks to Supercharge Incredible PBX 16-15



As September comes to a close, we wanted to offer up some simple tips and tricks to get the most out of Incredible PBX® 16-15. Many of these already have been covered on the PIAF Forum so, if you’re not already a subscriber, sign up to keep up with the latest information. Perhaps the most frequently asked question concerns the painfully slow restarts that some folks experience with SendMail and/or Fail2Ban. So let’s start there.

Assigning an FQDN to Your Server

Many system services depend upon identification of the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) assigned to your server. If you don’t have one, services such as Fail2Ban and SendMail have a difficult time starting and restarting. This includes the iptables-restart script which includes a restart of the Fail2Ban service. With SendMail, you not only will have difficulty restarting the service, but outbound email delivery also will fail since SendMail always checks for a valid sender email address before sending out a message.

If you don’t have a domain that you control, you can always use a free dynamic DNS service such as No-IP which has the added advantage of managing changes in your host’s IP address if you don’t have a static IP address.

Once you have an FQDN for your server, here are the simple steps to assign it to your server. First, edit /etc/hosts, add the FQDN immediately after 127.0.0.1, and then save the file. Next, edit /etc/hostname and replace the default entry with your FQDN. Finally, issue the following command using your actual FQDN: hostname FQDN.

Now you can test restarting Fail2Ban and SendMail with the following commands:

systemctl restart sendmail
systemctl restart fail2ban

And you can check the status of the two services with the following commands:

systemctl status sendmail
systemctl status fail2ban

Configuring SendMail/Exim with Incredible PBX 16-15

You’re not out of the woods yet if you wish to use SendMail (CentOS) or Exim (Raspbian) to deliver email and voicemail messages. Unless your PBX is in the Cloud with a public IP address on the Internet, be advised that many hosting providers such as Comcast, Spectrum, and AT&T block downstream mail servers from sending email. If you’re using one of these services in your home or office, the solution is to use Gmail or your local ISP as a smart relay host to send mail from your server. Setup instructions for SendMail on the CentOS 7 platform are available here. Setup instructions for Exim on the Raspberry Pi are available here.

Blocking Call Scammers and Robocalls

As election season kicks into high gear, expect robocalls to go through the roof. Not that the diehard scammers care but Congress exempted all politicians from the rules pertaining to robocalls. And then there are those that spoof a phone number similar to yours in order to treat you to the latest car warranty deal or Caribbean vacation. So here’s a way to block 99% of these callers, almost all of whom depend upon autodialers and call center software to distribute calls to live operators once you answer the call.

The design is simple to implement with Incredible PBX. Instead of answering incoming calls with a standard AutoAttendant or IVR, we’ll play a brief announcement followed by a request that the caller "press 7″ or some other number to be connected. When the caller doesn’t press the requested number within a brief number of seconds, Incredible PBX will hangup the call.

Many SIP providers support the early media feature which lets two SIP user agents communicate before a call is actually answered. If your provider supports this and you pay by the minute for inbound call traffic, then we’ll show you how to use the early media feature to block these callers without ever answering the calls and incurring charges. The easiest way to determine whether your SIP provider supports early media is to implement the early media code below and try a test call. If you hear the greeting message after dialing your own number, then early media is supported. If not, use the other dialplan code.

Incredible PBX already includes all the tools you’ll need to implement this. We’ll use a little modified Announcement dialplan code to greet the caller with Allison’s Generic Welcome message: "Thank you for calling. Please hold a moment while we locate someone to take your call." Then we’ll tack on an extra message which says: "To continue in English, press 7." If you’d prefer a different number, you can modify the dialplan code below accordingly.

Add this early media dialplan code to the end of /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf. If you prefer a number other than 7, then replace "7″ in both lines 4 and 6 below:

[hello-caller]
exten => s,1,Progress
exten => s,n(begin),Noop(Playing announcement Howdy as Early Media)
exten => s,n,Set(TIMEOUT(response)=10)
exten => s,n,Playback(custom/nv-GenericWelcome&silence/1&continue-in-english&press-7,noanswer)
exten => s,n,WaitExten(,)
exten => 7,1,Goto(ivr-1,s,1)
exten => t,1,Hangup
exten => i,1,Hangup
exten => fax,1,Noop(Fax detected!)
exten => fax,2,Goto(custom-fax-iaxmodem,s,1)
;--== end of [hello-caller] ==--;

In the FreePBX GUI, add a new Custom Destination:

Target: hello-caller,s,1
Description: Scam Blocker

In the FreePBX GUI, modify the Inbound Route for each DID and set the Destination to Custom Destination: Scam Blocker. Save your settings and reload your dialplan.

Now place a test call to your DID and see if you hear the greeting message. If so, you’re done.

If not, edit /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf and replace the [hello-caller] context at the bottom of the file with the following. You can replace "7″ on lines 6 and 8, if desired. Then reload your dialplan: asterisk -rx "dialplan reload". Then place another test call.

[hello-caller]
exten => s,1,GotoIf($["${CHANNEL(state)}" = "Up"]?begin)
exten => s,n,Answer
exten => s,n,Wait(1)
exten => s,n(begin),Noop(Playing announcement Howdy)
exten => s,n,Set(TIMEOUT(response)=10)
exten => s,n(play),Background(custom/nv-GenericWelcome&silence/1&continue-in-english&press-7,nm)
exten => s,n,WaitExten(,)
exten => 7,1,Goto(ivr-1,s,1)
exten => t,1,Hangup
exten => i,1,Hangup
exten => fax,1,Noop(Fax detected!)
exten => fax,2,Goto(custom-fax-iaxmodem,s,1)
;--== end of [hello-caller] ==--;

Separating Friends from Foes with Fail2Ban

If you’ve ever locked yourself out of your server when Fail2Ban mistakenly believed you were one of the bad guys, welcome to the club. Here’s the simple way to make sure it never happens again. First, deploy a NeoRouter Server and activate the NeoRouter Client on both your PBX and desktop machines. Always login to your PBX using the 10.0.0.x NeoRouter Client IP address of your PBX. Next, edit /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf. Scroll down to the [DEFAULT] section and edit the line which begins with ignoreip. Make certain the line includes the following entries. Then save the file and restart Fail2Ban: systemctl restart fail2ban

ignoreip = 127.0.0.1/8 10.0.0.0/24

You can always check who is currently banned with the command: iptables -nL

And you can unban an IP address by logging in to SSH from a different IP address and using the chain name and banned IP address shown in iptables -nL with the following command:

fail2ban-client set apache-forbidden unbanip xx.xx.xx.xx

Adding Outbound CNAM Data to CDRs

In many implementations, it’s useful in Call Detail Records (CDRs) to be able to associate names (CNAM) with outbound calls just as we do with incoming calls. One of our earliest Asterisk applications, CallerID Superfecta, provides an easy way to do that with just a little tweaking in Incredible PBX 16-15.

1. Open the FreePBX GUI in a browser and go to Admin -> CID Superfecta. There should be one Default setup but it’ll show as disabled. For some quirky reason, you can’t make enabling it stick so click on the third (COPY) option under Actions to create a second setup. Then go down to that one and click the first button (Enable) under Actions. Make future setup changes to CallerID Superfecta by clicking on that setup.

2. Next, log into your server as root and issue the following commands:

cd /root
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/dialout-cnam.tar.gz
tar zxvf dialout-cnam.tar.gz
rm -f dialout-cnam.tar.gz

3. Run the script: /root/install-dialout-cnam.sh. Choose the number of the new CID Superfecta setup (probably will be a negative number which is fine). No idea why.

4. Once the script completes, make a call from extension 701 to an outside number. The new CNAM info should be shown in the ACCOUNT column of your CDR listing.

Originally published: Monday, September 30, 2019



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Desktop Dream Machine: Incredible PBX 16-15 for VirtualBox




If you’re new to the VoIP world and want to kick the tires to see what you’re missing, then today’s one minute setup is for you. You’ll get a $10 credit to try out some penny-a-minute calls and to purchase a $1 a month phone number in your choice of area codes. If you decide VoIP is not for you, you don’t have to buy anything ever. And you can use almost any desktop computer you already own to bring up the VirtualBox® edition of Incredible PBX® 16-15.

If you’ve followed Nerd Vittles over the years, you already know that VirtualBox from Oracle® is one of our favorite platforms. Once VirtualBox is installed on your desktop computer, adding Incredible PBX is a snap. Download the latest Incredible PBX image from SourceForge, double-click on the downloaded image, check the initialize MAC address box, and boom. In less than a minute, your PBX is ready to use. There are no hidden fees or crippleware to hinder your use of Incredible PBX for as long as you like. Just set up an account with our Platinum provider, Skyetel, and you can start making calls in minutes. Of course, the Incredible PBX feature set is included as well which brings you nearly three dozen applications for Asterisk® that will revolutionize your communications platform. Speech-to-text, voice recognition, and a Siri-like telephony interface are as close as your SIP phone.

Installing Oracle VM VirtualBox

Oracle’s virtual machine platform inherited from Sun is amazing. It’s not only free, but it’s pure GPL2 code. VirtualBox gives you a virtual machine platform that runs on top of any desktop operating system. In terms of limitations, we haven’t found any. We even tested this on an Atom-based Windows 7 machine with 2GB of RAM, and it worked without a hiccup. So step #1 today is to download one or more of the VirtualBox installers from VirtualBox.org or Oracle.com. Our recommendation is to put all of the 100MB installers on a 4GB thumb drive.1 Then you’ll have everything in one place whenever and wherever you happen to need it. Once you’ve downloaded the software, simply install it onto your favorite desktop machine. Accept all of the default settings, and you’ll be good to go. For more details, here’s a link to the Oracle VM VirtualBox User Manual.

Installing the Incredible PBX 16-15 Image

To begin, download the Incredible PBX 16-15 image (3.2 GB) onto your desktop.

Next, double-click on the Incredible PBX .ova image on your desktop. Be sure to check the box to initialize the MAC address of the image and then click Import. Once the import is finished, you’ll see a new Incredible PBX virtual machine in the VM List of the VirtualBox Manager Window. Let’s make a couple of one-time adjustments to the Incredible PBX configuration to account for possible differences in sound and network cards on different host machines.

(1) Click once on the Incredible PBX virtual machine in the VM List. Then (2) click the Settings button. In the Audio tab, check the Enable Audio option and choose your sound card. In the Network tab for Adapter 1, check the Enable Network Adapter option. From the Attached to pull-down menu, choose Bridged Adapter. Then select your network card from the Name list. Then click OK. That’s all the configuration that is necessary for Incredible PBX.

Running Incredible PBX 16-15 in VirtualBox

Once you’ve imported and configured the Incredible PBX Virtual Machine, you’re ready to go. Highlight the Incredible PBX virtual machine in the VM List on the VirtualBox Manager Window and click the Start button. The standard Linux boot procedure will begin and, within a few seconds, you’ll get the familiar Linux login prompt. During the bootstrap procedure, you’ll see a couple of dialogue boxes pop up that explain the keystrokes to move back and forth between your host operating system desktop and your virtual machine. Remember, you still have full access to your desktop computer. Incredible PBX is merely running as a task in a VM window. Always gracefully halt Incredible PBX just as you would on any computer.

Here’s what you need to know. To work in the Incredible PBX virtual machine, just left-click your mouse while it is positioned inside the VM window. To return to your host operating system desktop, press the right Option key on Windows machines or the left Command key on any Mac. For other operating systems, read the dialogue boxes for instructions on moving around. To access the Linux CLI, login as root with the default password: password. Change your root password immediately by typing: passwd. Then update your admin password for web access by typing: ./admin-pw-change. You’ll need the admin password to access the web GUI and manage your PBX. You can update all of your other passwords using the scripts provided in /root.

Setting the Date and Time with VirtualBox

On some platforms, VirtualBox has a nasty habit of mangling the date and time of your virtual machine. Typing date will tell you whether your VM is affected. If it’s a problem, manually set the date and time and then update the hardware clock. Here’s how assuming 08130709 is the month, day, and correct time of your server:

date 08130709
clock -w

Configuring Skyetel for Incredible PBX 16-15

If you’d like to try out the Skyetel service at no charge, here’s the drill. Sign up for Skyetel service to take advantage of the Nerd Vittles specials. First, complete the Prequalification Form here. You then will be provided a link to the Skyetel site to complete your registration. Once you have registered on the Skyetel site and your account has been activated, open a support ticket and request the $10 credit for your account by referencing the Nerd Vittles special offer. Once you are satisfied with the service, fund your account as desired, and Skyetel will match your deposit of up to $250 simply by opening another ticket. That gets you up to $500 of half-price calling. Credit is limited to one per person, company, and address. Effective 10/1/2023, $25/month minimum spend required.

Skyetel does not use SIP registrations to make connections to your PBX. Instead, Skyetel utilizes Endpoint Groups to identify which servers can communicate with the Skyetel service. An Endpoint Group consists of a Name, an IP address, a UDP or TCP port for the connection, and a numerical Priority for the group. For incoming calls destined to your PBX, DIDs are associated with an Endpoint Group to route the calls to your PBX. For outgoing calls from your PBX, a matching Endpoint Group is required to authorize outbound calls through the Skyetel network. Thus, the first step in configuring the Skyetel side for use with your PBX is to set up an Endpoint Group. Here’s a typical setup for Incredible PBX 16-15:

  • Name: MyPBX
  • Priority: 1
  • IP Address: PBX-Public-IP-Address
  • Port: 5060
  • Protocol: UDP
  • Description: my.incrediblepbx.com

To receive incoming PSTN calls, you’ll need at least one DID. On the Skyetel site, you acquire DIDs under the Phone Numbers tab. You have the option of Porting in Existing Numbers (free for the first 60 days after you sign up for service) or purchasing new ones under the Buy Phone Numbers menu option.

Once you have acquired one or more DIDs, navigate to the Local Numbers or Toll Free Numbers tab and specify the desired SIP Format and Endpoint Group for each DID. Add SMS/MMS and E911 support, if desired. Call Forwarding and Failover are also supported. That completes the VoIP setup on the Skyetel side. System Status is always available here.

Configuring VoIP.ms for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for VoIP.ms service, may we suggest you use our signup link so that Nerd Vittles gets a referral credit for your signup. Once your account is set up, you’ll need to set up a SIP SubAccount and, for Authentication Type, choose Static IP Authentication and enter your Incredible PBX 16-15 server’s public IP address. For Transport, choose UDP. For Device Type, choose Asterisk, IP PBX, Gateway or VoIP Switch. Order a DID in their web panel, and then point the DID to the SubAccount you just created. Be sure to specify atlanta1.voip.ms as the POP from which to receive incoming calls.

Configuring V1VoIP for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for V1VoIP service, sign up on their web site. Then login to your account and order a DID under the DIDs tab. Once the DID has been assigned, choose View DIDs and click on the Forwarding button beside your DID. For Option #1, choose Forward to IP Address/PBX. For the Forwarding Address, enter the public IP address of your server. For the T/O (timeout) value, set it to 2o seconds. Then click the Update button. Under the Termination tab, create a new Endpoint with the public IP address of your server so that you can place outbound calls through V1VoIP.

Configuring Anveo Direct for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for Anveo Direct service, sign up on their web site and then login. After adding funds to your account, purchase a DID under Inbound Service -> Order DID. Next, choose Configure Destination SIP Trunk. Give the Trunk a name. For the Primary SIP URI, enter $[E164]$@server-IP-address. For Call Options, select your new DID from the list. You also must whitelist your public IP address under Outbound Service -> Configure. Create a new Call Termination Trunk and name it to match your server. For Dialing Prefix, choose six alphanumeric characters beginning with a zero. In Authorized IP Addresses, enter the public IP address of your server. Set an appropriate rate cap. We like $0.01 per minute to be safe. Set a concurrent calls limit. We like 2. For the Call Routing Method, choose Least Cost unless you’re feeling extravagant. For Routes/Carriers, choose Standard Routes. Write down your Dialing Prefix and then click the Save button.

Before you can make outbound calls through Anveo Direct from your PBX, you first must configure the Dialing Prefix that you wrote down in the previous step. Log into the GUI as admin using a web browser and edit the Anveo-Out trunk in Connectivity -> Trunks. Click on the custom-Settings tab and replace anveo-pin with your actual Dialing Prefix. Click Submit and Apply Config to complete the setup.

By default, incoming Anveo Direct calls will be processed by the Default inbound route on your PBX. If you wish to redirect incoming Anveo Direct calls using DID-specific inbound routes, then you’ve got a bit more work to do. In addition to creating the inbound route using the 11-digit Anveo Direct DID, enter the following commands after logging into your server as root using SSH/Putty:

cd /etc/asterisk
echo "[from-anveo]" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,1,Ringing" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,n,Goto(from-trunk,\\${SIP_HEADER(X-anveo-e164)},1)" >> extensions_custom.conf
asterisk -rx "dialplan reload"

Configuring a Softphone for Incredible PBX 16-15

We’re in the home stretch now. You can connect virtually any kind of telephone to your new PBX. Plain Old Phones require an analog telephone adapter (ATA) which can be a separate board in your computer from a company such as Digium. Or it can be a standalone SIP device such as ObiHai’s OBi100 or OBi110 (if you have a phone line from Ma Bell to hook up as well). SIP phones can be connected directly so long as they have an IP address. These could be hardware devices or software devices such as the YateClient softphone. We’ll start with a free one today so you can begin making calls. You can find dozens of recommendations for hardware-based SIP phones both on Nerd Vittles and the PIAF Forum when you’re ready to get serious about VoIP telephony.

We recommend YateClient which is free. Download it from here. Run YateClient once you’ve installed it and enter the credentials for the 701 extension on Incredible PBX. You can find them by running /root/show-passwords. You’ll need the IP address of your server plus your extension 701 password. In the YateClient, fill in the blanks using the IP address of your Server, 701 for your Username, and whatever Password was assigned to the extension when you installed Incredible PBX. Click OK to save your entries.

Configuring Incredible PBX for VirtualBox

In order to take advantage of all the Incredible PBX applications, you’ll need to obtain IBM text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-text (STT) credentials as well as a (free) Application ID for Wolfram Alpha.

This Nerd Vittles tutorial will walk you through getting your IBM account set up and obtaining both your TTS and STT credentials. Be sure to write down BOTH sets of credentials which you’ll need in a minute. For home and SOHO use, IBM access and services are mostly FREE even though you must provide a credit card when signing up. The IBM signup process explains their pricing plans.

To use Wolfram Alpha, sign up for a free Wolfram Alpha API account. Just provide your email address and set up a password. It takes less than a minute. Log into your account and click on Get An App ID. Make up a name for your application and write down (and keep secret) your APP-ID code. That’s all there is to getting set up with Wolfram Alpha. If you want to explore costs for commercial use, there are links to let you get more information.

In addition to your Wolfram Alpha APPID, there are two sets of IBM credentials to plug into the Asterisk AGI scripts. Keep in mind that there are different usernames and passwords for the IBM Watson TTS and STT services. The TTS credentials will look like the following: $IBM_username and $IBM_password. The STT credentials look like this: $API_USERNAME and $API_PASSWORD. Don’t mix them up. 🙂

All of the scripts requiring credentials are located in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin so switch to that directory after logging into your server as root. Edit each of the following files and insert your TTS credentials in the variables already provided: nv-today2.php, ibmtts.php, and ibmtts2.php. Edit each of the following files and insert your STT credentials in the variables already provided: getquery.sh, getnumber.sh, and getnumber2.sh. Finally, edit 4747 and insert your Wolfram Alpha APPID.

Using Asteridex with Incredible PBX

AsteriDex is a web-based dialer and address book application for Asterisk and Incredible PBX. It lets you store and manage phone numbers of all your friends and business associates in an easy-to-use SQLite3 database. You simply call up the application with your favorite web browser: http://pbx-ip-address/asteridex4/. When you click on a contact that you wish to call, AsteriDex first calls you at extension 701, and then AsteriDex connects you to your contact through another outbound call made using your default outbound trunk that supports numbers in the 1NXXNXXXXXX format.

Taking Incredible PBX for a Test Drive

You can take Incredible PBX on a test drive by dialing D-E-M-O (3366) from any phone connected to your PBX.

With Allison’s Demo IVR, you can choose from the following options:

  • 0. Chat with Operator — connects to extension 701
  • 1. AsteriDex Voice Dialer – say "Delta Airlines" or "American Airlines" to connect
  • 2. Conferencing – log in using 1234 as the conference PIN
  • 3. Wolfram Alpha Almanac – say "What planes are flying overhead"
  • 4. Lenny – The Telemarketer’s Worst Nightmare
  • 5. Today’s News Headlines — courtesy of Yahoo! News
  • 6. Weather by ZIP Code – enter any 5-digit ZIP code for today’s weather
  • 7. Today in History — courtesy of OnThisDay.com
  • 8. Chat with Nerd Uno — courtesy of SIP URI connection to 3CX iPhone Client
  • 9. DISA Voice Dialer — say any 10-digit number to be connected
  • *. Current Date and Time — courtesy of Incredible PBX

Originally published: Monday, September 23, 2019



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



  1. Many of our purchase links refer users to Amazon when we find their prices are competitive for the recommended products. Nerd Vittles receives a small referral fee from Amazon to help cover the costs of our blog. We never recommend particular products solely to generate Amazon commissions. However, when pricing is comparable or availability is favorable, we support Amazon because Amazon supports us. []

Honeymoon Time: Meet Incredible PBX 16-15.2 for CentOS 7



After two months of development, we are pleased to announce the production-ready release of Incredible PBX 16-15 on the CentOS 7 platform with the latest Asterisk® 16 and FreePBX® 15 components. After years of frustrating upgrades, we are equally pleased to announce that those running Incredible PBX 13-13 can upgrade to the new Incredible PBX 16-15 platform with a handful of button clicks. And you’ll never miss a beat. What are you waiting for?

In addition to the latest Asterisk 16 release, you also get the entire FreePBX 15 GPL module collection including their new User Control Panel (UCP) and a much enhanced web GUI plus the entire Incredible PBX feature set. As with Incredible PBX LITE, it’s plug-and-play with immediate calling capability using any of four commercial SIP providers. Or you can choose one of 16 other preconfigured SIP providers, enter your credentials, and enjoy instant connectivity without worrying about SIP settings. Last, but not least, you can easily turn your Incredible PBX 16-15 server into a secure public-facing PBX or interconnect a Raspberry Pi for traveling so that you never miss a call.

What’s Included? Incredible PBX 16-15 serves up a VoIP powerhouse featuring Asterisk 16, the FreePBX 15 GPL platform including User Control Panel (UCP), an Apache web server, the latest MariaDB SQL server (formerly MySQL), SendMail, and the Incredible PBX feature set including SIP, SMS, Opus, voice recognition, PicoTTS Text-to-Speech VoIP applications plus fax support, Click-to-Dial, News, Weather, Reminders, ODBC, and hundreds of features that typically are found in commercial PBXs: Conferencing, IVRs and AutoAttendants, Email Delivery of Voicemails, and much more.

Choosing a SIP Provider. Incredible PBX 16-15 comes preconfigured with support for five SIP extensions and four of the major SIP providers: Skyetel, VoIP.ms, V1VoIP, and Anveo Direct. We obviously hope you’ll choose Skyetel not only because they financially support Nerd Vittles and our open source projects, but also because it is a clearly superior platform offering crystal-clear communications and triple-redundancy so you never miss a call. Skyetel also sets itself apart from the other providers in the support department. They actually respond to issues, and there’s never a charge. As the old saying goes, they may not be the cheapest, but you get what you pay for. Even without taking advantage of Nerd Vittles half-price offer on up to $500 of Skyetel services, they’re still dirt cheap compared to the Bell Sisters and cable companies. Skyetel is so sure you’ll love their service that they give you a $10 credit to kick the tires before you ever spend a dime. Traditional DIDs are $1 per month. Outbound conversational calls are $0.012 per minute. Incoming conversational calls are a penny a minute, and CallerID lookups are $0.004. You only pay for minutes you use. Once you’re satisfied with the service and fund your account, you can port in your existing DIDs at no cost for 60 days after signup. In short, you have nothing to lose by trying out the Skyetel service. Effective 10/1/2023, $25/month minimum spend required.

Choosing a Platform for Incredible PBX 16-15

As with our other open source offerings, the platform choice for Incredible PBX 16-15 depends upon a number of factors. For most folks, you’d be crazy to go out and purchase hardware to use in your home or office when cloud-based platforms are available for about a dollar a month. Unless you plan to publicly expose your server on the Internet to facilitate remote SIP connections, the OpenVZ offerings below are perfectly adequate while in business with the cautionary note that you need off-site backups AND a tested backup plan. Three providers previously listed have closed their doors in 2019. You’ve been warned.

ProviderRAMDiskBandwidthPerformance as of 12/1/19Cost
CrownCloud KVM (LA)1GB20GB +
Snapshot
1TB/month598Mb/DN 281Mb/UP
2CPU Core
$25/year
Best Buy!
Naranjatech KVM (The Netherlands)1GB20GB1TB/monthHosting since 2005
VAT: EU res.
20€/year w/code:
SBF2019
BudgetNode KVM (LA)1GB40GB RAID101TB/monthAlso available in U.K PM @Ishaq on LET before payment$24/year
FreeRangeCloud KVM (Ashburn VA, Winnipeg, Freemont CA)1GB20GB SSD3TB/monthPick EGG loc'n
Open ticket for last 5GB SSD
$30/year w/code:
LEBEGG30

Installing Incredible PBX 16-15 with CentOS 7

9/21 ALERT UPDATE: A recent SolusVM update has broken systemd upon which Incredible PBX and Asterisk depend. SolusVM is the virtualizer used by many of the bargain-basement cloud providers. For the time being, these installs fail so you are cautioned to avoid any SolusVM-based cloud platform. Vultr, Digital Ocean, and OVH are your best bets at the moment. And Vultr and Digital Ocean both support Nerd Vittles through referral credits. We will post an update when the situation changes.

If you’ve installed previous iterations of Incredible PBX, today’s drill is similar. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the install procedure for Incredible PBX 16-15. Begin by installing a minimal CentOS 7 (64-bit) platform or pick the CentOS 7 option with 1GB RAM and 20GB of storage from your cloud provider’s menu of choices. Then log into your server as root and issue the following commands:

passwd
yum -y update
yum -y install net-tools nano wget tar
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx16-15.2.tar.gz
tar zxvf incrediblepbx16-15.2.tar.gz
rm -f incrediblepbx16-15.2.tar.gz
# to add swap file on non-OpenVZ cloud platforms with no swap file
./create-swapfile-DO
# kick off Phase I install
./IncrediblePBX16-15.sh
# after reboot, kick off Phase II install
./IncrediblePBX16-15.sh
# add HylaFax/AvantFax, if desired
./incrediblefax16.sh
# set desired timezone
./timezone-setup
# display your passwords
./show-passwords
# remember to enable TUN/TAP if using VPS Control Panel with OpenVZ
# reconfigure PortKnocker if installing on an OpenVZ platform
echo 'OPTIONS="-i venet0:0"' >> /etc/sysconfig/knockd
service knockd restart
# set up NeoRouter VPN client, if desired
nrclientcmd
# check network speed
wget -O speedtest-cli https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py
chmod +x speedtest-cli
./speedtest-cli

WebMin is also installed and configured as part of the base install. The root password for access is the same as your Linux root password. We strongly recommend that you not use WebMin to make configuration changes to your server. You may inadvertently damage the operation of your PBX beyond repair. WebMin is an excellent tool to LOOK at how your server is configured. When used for that purpose, we highly recommend WebMin as a way to become familiar with your Linux configuration.

Planning Ahead for That Rainy Day

If you haven’t already learned the hard way, let us save you from a future shock. Hardware fails. All of it. So spend an extra hour now so that you’ll be prepared when (not if) disaster strikes. First, once you have your new PBX configured the way you plan to use it, make a backup of your PBX by running the Incredible Backup script: /root/incrediblebackup16

Copy down the name of the backup file that was created. You’ll need it in a few minutes.

Second, build yourself an identical VirtualBox platform on your desktop PC. It’s the same steps as outlined above.

Next, create a /backup folder on your VirtualBox PBX and copy the backup file from your main server to your VirtualBox server and restore it after logging in to VirtualBox PBX as root:

mkdir /backup
scp root@main-pbx-ip-address:/backup/backup-file-name.tar.gz /backup/.
/root/incrediblerestore16 /backup/backup-file-name.tar.gz

Complaints that you "forgot" to make a backup and your hardware has failed or your provider has gone out of business are not welcomed. We’re sorry for your loss. Case closed.

Completing the Incredible PBX Setup Procedure

Unless your desktop PC and server are both on the same private LAN, the install procedure should be performed from a desktop PC using SSH or Putty. This will insure that your desktop PC is also whitelisted in the Incredible PBX firewall. Using the console to perform the install is NOT recommended as your desktop PC will not be whitelisted in the firewall. This may result in your not being able to log in to your server. Once you have network connectivity, log in to your server as root from a desktop PC using your root password. Accept the license agreement by pressing ENTER.

Kick off the Phase I install. Once your server reboots and you log back in as root, start the Phase II install. All of your passwords will be randomly assigned with the exception of the root user Linux password. You can set it at any time by issuing the command: passwd. You also must set up an admin password to access the FreePBX web GUI with the command: /root/admin-pw-change. With the exception of your root user and FreePBX admin passwords, most of the remaining passwords can be displayed using the command: /root/show-passwords.

Finally, if your PBX is sitting behind a NAT-based router, you’ll need to redirect incoming UDP 5060 and UDP 10000-20000 traffic to the private IP address of your PBX. This is required for all of the SIP providers included in the Incredible PBX 16-15 default build that don’t require a SIP registration. Otherwise, inbound calls will fail.

Configuring Skyetel for Incredible PBX 16-15

If you’ve decided to go with Skyetel, here’s the drill. Sign up for Skyetel service and take advantage of the Nerd Vittles specials. First, complete the Prequalification Form here. You then will be provided a link to the Skyetel site to complete your registration. Once you have registered on the Skyetel site and your account has been activated, open a support ticket and request the $10 credit for your account by referencing the Nerd Vittles special offer. Once you are satisfied with the service, fund your account as desired, and Skyetel will match your deposit of up to $250 simply by opening another ticket. That gets you up to $500 of half-price calling. Credit is limited to one per person/company/address/location.

Skyetel does not use SIP registrations to make connections to your PBX. Instead, Skyetel utilizes Endpoint Groups to identify which servers can communicate with the Skyetel service. An Endpoint Group consists of a Name, an IP address, a UDP or TCP port for the connection, and a numerical Priority for the group. For incoming calls destined to your PBX, DIDs are associated with an Endpoint Group to route the calls to your PBX. For outgoing calls from your PBX, a matching Endpoint Group is required to authorize outbound calls through the Skyetel network. Thus, the first step in configuring the Skyetel side for use with your PBX is to set up an Endpoint Group. Here’s a typical setup for Incredible PBX 16-15:

  • Name: MyPBX
  • Priority: 1
  • IP Address: PBX-Public-IP-Address
  • Port: 5060
  • Protocol: UDP
  • Description: my.incrediblepbx.com

To receive incoming PSTN calls, you’ll need at least one DID. On the Skyetel site, you acquire DIDs under the Phone Numbers tab. You have the option of Porting in Existing Numbers (free for the first 60 days after you sign up for service) or purchasing new ones under the Buy Phone Numbers menu option.

Once you have acquired one or more DIDs, navigate to the Local Numbers or Toll Free Numbers tab and specify the desired SIP Format and Endpoint Group for each DID. Add SMS/MMS and E911 support, if desired. Call Forwarding and Failover are also supported. That completes the VoIP setup on the Skyetel side. System Status is always available here.

Configuring VoIP.ms for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for VoIP.ms service, may we suggest you use our signup link so that Nerd Vittles gets a referral credit for your signup. Once your account is set up, you’ll need to set up a SIP SubAccount and, for Authentication Type, choose Static IP Authentication and enter your Incredible PBX 16-15 server’s public IP address. For Transport, choose UDP. For Device Type, choose Asterisk, IP PBX, Gateway or VoIP Switch. Order a DID in their web panel, and then point the DID to the SubAccount you just created. Be sure to specify atlanta1.voip.ms as the POP from which to receive incoming calls.

Configuring V1VoIP for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for V1VoIP service, sign up on their web site. Then login to your account and order a DID under the DIDs tab. Once the DID has been assigned, choose View DIDs and click on the Forwarding button beside your DID. For Option #1, choose Forward to IP Address/PBX. For the Forwarding Address, enter the public IP address of your server. For the T/O (timeout) value, set it to 2o seconds. Then click the Update button. Under the Termination tab, create a new Endpoint with the public IP address of your server so that you can place outbound calls through V1VoIP.

Configuring Anveo Direct for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for Anveo Direct service, sign up on their web site and then login. After adding funds to your account, purchase a DID under Inbound Service -> Order DID. Next, choose Configure Destination SIP Trunk. Give the Trunk a name. For the Primary SIP URI, enter $[E164]$@server-IP-address. For Call Options, select your new DID from the list. You also must whitelist your public IP address under Outbound Service -> Configure. Create a new Call Termination Trunk and name it to match your server. For Dialing Prefix, choose six alphanumeric characters beginning with a zero. In Authorized IP Addresses, enter the public IP address of your server. Set an appropriate rate cap. We like $0.01 per minute to be safe. Set a concurrent calls limit. We like 2. For the Call Routing Method, choose Least Cost unless you’re feeling extravagant. For Routes/Carriers, choose Standard Routes. Write down your Dialing Prefix and then click the Save button.

Before you can make outbound calls through Anveo Direct from your PBX, you first must configure the Dialing Prefix that you wrote down in the previous step. Log into the GUI as admin using a web browser and edit the Anveo-Out trunk in Connectivity -> Trunks. Click on the custom-Settings tab and replace anveo-pin with your actual Dialing Prefix. Click Submit and Apply Config to complete the setup.

By default, incoming Anveo Direct calls will be processed by the Default inbound route on your PBX. If you wish to redirect incoming Anveo Direct calls using DID-specific inbound routes, then you’ve got a bit more work to do. In addition to creating the inbound route using the 11-digit Anveo Direct DID, enter the following commands after logging into your server as root using SSH/Putty:

cd /etc/asterisk
echo "[from-anveo]" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,1,Ringing" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,n,Goto(from-trunk,\\${SIP_HEADER(X-anveo-e164)},1)" >> extensions_custom.conf
asterisk -rx "dialplan reload"

Configuring a Softphone for Incredible PBX 16-15

We’re in the home stretch now. You can connect virtually any kind of telephone to your new PBX. Plain Old Phones require an analog telephone adapter (ATA) which can be a separate board in your computer from a company such as Digium. Or it can be a standalone SIP device such as ObiHai’s OBi100 or OBi110 (if you have a phone line from Ma Bell to hook up as well). SIP phones can be connected directly so long as they have an IP address. These could be hardware devices or software devices such as the YateClient softphone. We’ll start with a free one today so you can begin making calls. You can find dozens of recommendations for hardware-based SIP phones both on Nerd Vittles and the PIAF Forum when you’re ready to get serious about VoIP telephony.

We recommend YateClient which is free. Download it from here. Run YateClient once you’ve installed it and enter the credentials for the 701 extension on Incredible PBX. You can find them by running /root/show-passwords. You’ll need the IP address of your server plus your extension 701 password. In the YateClient, fill in the blanks using the IP address of your Server, 701 for your Username, and whatever Password was assigned to the extension when you installed Incredible PBX. Click OK to save your entries.

Once you are registered to extension 701, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place some test calls to the numerous apps that are preconfigured on Incredible PBX. Dial a few of these to get started:

DEMO - Apps Demo
123 - Reminders
947 - Weather by ZIP Code
951 - Yahoo News
TODAY - Today in History
LENNY - The Telemarketer's Worst Nightmare

If you are a Mac user, another great no-frills softphone is Telephone. Just download and install it from the Mac App Store. For Android users, check out the terrific new VitalPBX Communicator. Works flawlessly with Incredible PBX.

Audio Issues with Incredible PBX 16-15

If you experience one-way or no audio on some calls, add your external IP address and LAN subnet in the GUI by navigating to Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. In the NAT Settings section, click Detect Network Settings. Click Submit and Apply Settings to save your changes.

Incredible PBX 16-15 Administration

We’ve eased the pain of administering your new PBX with a collection of scripts which you will find in the /root folder after logging in with SSH or Putty. Here’s a quick summary of what each of the scripts does.

add-fqdn is used to whitelist a fully-qualified domain name in the firewall. Because Incredible PBX 16-15 blocks all traffic from IP addresses that are not whitelisted, this is what you use to authorize an external user for your PBX. The advantage of an FQDN is that you can use a dynamic DNS service to automatically update the IP address associated with an FQDN so that you never lose connectivity.

add-ip is used to whitelist a public IP address in the firewall. See the add-fqdn explanation as to why this matters.

del-acct is used to remove an IP address or FQDN from the firewall’s whitelist.

admin-pw-change is used to set the admin password for access to the FreePBX/Incredible PBX web GUI using a browser pointed to the local IP address of your server.

apache-pw-change is used to set the admin password for access to Apache/Incredible PBX apps including AsteriDex and Reminders. This provides a password layer of protection for access to these applications.

reset-conference-pins is a script that automatically and randomly resets the user and admin pins for access to the preconfigured conferencing application. Dial C-O-N-F from any registered SIP phone to connect to the conference.

reset-extension-passwords is a script that automatically and randomly resets ALL of the SIP passwords for extensions 701-705. Be careful using this one, or you may disable existing registered phones and cause Fail2Ban to blacklist the IP addresses of those users. HINT: You can place a call to the Ring Group associated with all five extensions by dialing 777.

reset-reminders-pin is a script that automatically and randomly resets the pin required to access the Telephone Reminders application by dialing 123. It’s important to protect this application because a nefarious user could set up a reminder to call a number anywhere in the world assuming your SIP provider’s account was configured to allow such calls.

show-feature-codes is a cheat sheet for all of the feature codes which can be dialed from any registered SIP phone. It documents how powerful a platform Incredible PBX 16-15 actually is. A similar listing is available in the GUI at Admin -> Feature Codes.

show-passwords is a script that displays most of the passwords associated with Incredible PBX 16-15. This includes SIP extension passwords, voicemail pins, conference pins, telephone reminders pin, and your Anveo Direct outbound calling pin (if configured). Note that voicemail pins are configured by the user of a SIP extension the first time the user accesses the voicemail system by dialing *97.

update-IncrediblePBX is the Automatic Update Utility which checks for server updates from incrediblepbx.com every time you log into your server as root using SSH or Putty. Do NOT disable it as it is used to load important fixes and security updates when necessary. We recommend logging into your server at least once a week.

pbxstatus (shown above) displays status of all major components of Incredible PBX 16-15.

Forwarding Calls to Your Cellphone. Keep in mind that inbound calls to your DIDs automatically ring all five SIP extensions, 701-705. The easiest way to also ring your cellphone is to set one of these five extensions to forward incoming calls to your cellphone. After logging into your PBX as root, issue the following command to forward calls from extension 705 to your cellphone: asterisk -rx "database put CF 705 6781234567"

To remove call forwarding: asterisk -rx "database del CF 705"

Configuring SendMail with Incredible PBX 16-15

In order to receive voicemails by email delivery, outbound mail functionality from your server obviously is required. If you’ve deployed your server in your home, your Internet Service Provider probably blocks downstream mail servers such as Incredible PBX from sending mail. This is done to reduce SPAM. In this case, you will need to configure SendMail using either your ISP or Gmail as an SMTP Relay Host. Here are the steps using a Gmail account:

cd /etc/mail
yum -y install sendmail-cf
hostname -f > genericsdomain
touch genericstable
cd /usr/bin
rm -f makemap
ln -s ../sbin/makemap.sendmail makemap
cd /etc/mail
makemap -r hash genericstable.db < genericstable
mv sendmail.mc sendmail.mc.original
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/sendmail.mc.gmail
cp sendmail.mc.gmail sendmail.mc
mkdir -p auth
chmod 700 auth
cd auth
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" > client-info
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:587 \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" >> client-info
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:465 \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" >> client-info
# Stop here and edit client-info (nano -w client-info) in all three lines.
# Replace  user_id with your gMail account name without @gmail.com
# Replace password with your real gMail password OR
#  use your Gmail App Key if 2-step verification is enabled
# Be sure to replace the double-quotes shown above if they don't appear in the file!!!
# Save your changes (Ctrl-X, Y, then Enter)
chmod 600 client-info
makemap -r hash client-info.db < client-info
cd ..
make
systemctl restart sendmail

If your server is hosted in the cloud and your provider does not block TCP port 25, then you can send mail without using a SmartHost; however, your server's hostname must actually be real or downstream mail servers will reject your mail. You can set your server's hostname like this: hostname myserver.myhost.com. This is usually sufficient; however, it's a good idea to also add the hostname in /etc/hostname and in /etc/hosts as the first entry on 127.0.0.1 line:

127.0.0.1   myserver.myhost.com pbx.local localhost localhost.localdomain

Next, test outbound mail using this command with your actual email address:

echo "test" | mail -s testmessage yourname@youremaildomain.com

Once you are sure your emails are being delivered reliably, here's a sample GUI voicemail configuration for an extension:



Getting Started with Incredible Fax 16

Believe it or not, there still are lots of folks that use faxes in their everyday lives. If you're one of them, Incredible PBX has your back. Begin by logging into your server as root and running incrediblefax16.sh to install HylaFax and AvantFax on your server. You'll be prompted a dozen or more times for information. Answer no to the secure fax question. For the rest of the prompts, just press ENTER to accept the default entries. Rebooting your server is required when the install finishes. Once your server is back on line, there will be a new AvantFax tab in the GUI. Before proceeding, be sure to set an Apache web apps password by running /root/apache-pw-change. Next, login to AvantFax with your browser. You first will be prompted for your Apache credentials. Enter admin for the username and whatever password you set up in the previous step. Then you will be prompted for your AvantFax credentials. The default is admin:password. After you enter the username and password, you will be prompted to change your admin password. The old password is still password. Then enter your desired password twice and save the setting. The AvantFax dashboard then will display. If nothing has come unglued, you should see four green Idle icons:



You can Send Faxes from within AvantFax by choosing the Send Fax tab, or you can use one of many HylaFax clients. Google is your friend.

Receiving faxes currently has issues not the least of which are fax detection being broken and incoming faxes never reaching the specified destination. We will continue to work on this and provide updates when they become available. For the time being, the simple workaround if you're using Skyetel as your provider is to designate a DID as a fax line (Call Routing: vFax) in the Skyetel Dashboard. Then Skyetel will manage the incoming faxes without any additional configuration on your PBX. You still can send faxes from within the AvantFax GUI.

Getting Started with ODBC for Asterisk

If you're new to the ODBC World, here's a quick primer. The idea behind Open Data Base Connectivity is to simplify the task of connecting up any flavor database management system so that it can talk to applications and foreign databases without having to write custom code to support every different DBMS. ODBC serves in much the same way as a translator who sits between you and foreign visitors. With the benefit of a translator, whatever is spoken is understood on both ends of the conversation. The real beauty of ODBC is that it is conversant with almost every DBMS offering on the planet including Oracle, Informix, SAS, MS Access, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Sybase, and even dBase, FoxPro, and XDB. All you really need is the ODBC connector for your operating system plus one or more database drivers for the DBMS data sources you wish to use.

Because the FreePBX modules are driven by MySQL tables, we've included the MySQL connector for Asterisk in Incredible PBX 16-15 together with two sample applications to get you started. If you add your own MySQL databases, it's easy to connect them with ODBC by simply running the odbc-gen.sh script in /root again. The two sample applications we've included will show you how to integrate ODBC queries into your Asterisk dialplan. The code is available in odbc.conf in the /etc/asterisk folder. The first sample is a typical employee database. By dialing 222, you will be prompted to enter the employee number (12345), and the ODBC app then will look up the employee number and read you the name of the employee. The second sample is a speed dialer using the AsteriDex database. The sample entries in the database include a 3-numeric-digit DIALCODE which simply matches the first three letters of each AsteriDex name spelled out on a phone, e.g. 335 = DELta Airlines and 263 = AMErican Airlines. As you add new entries to AsteriDex, you can add dialcodes in the same way or in any other scheme you prefer. Once you have signed up with a provider so that you can make outbound calls, just dial 223 and enter the AsteriDex dialcode to place the call. Think of it as a Speed Dialer on Steroids.

Beginning the Incredible PBX 13-13 Migration

For anyone that's been involved with Asterisk and FreePBX, you already know what a pain it was to move from one release to another. It's still not quite automatic, but it's damn close. You can't perform an in-place migration to move from Asterisk 13 and FreePBX 13 to Asterisk 16 with FreePBX 15. So you'll need to first bring up an Incredible PBX 16-15.2 platform as documented above. It must be separate and apart from your already functioning Incredible PBX 13-13.10 server. Once you've done that, use add-ip to whitelist the IP address of your 13-13 server on the 16-15 PBX and whitelist the IP address of your 16-15 server on the 13-13 PBX. This will make it easy to copy files between the two servers.

In addition to the whitelisting procedure above, there are three more steps to complete on the Incredible PBX 13-13 server. First, you'll need to update the backup module:

cd /root
./gpl-install-fpbx backup

Next, login to the GUI as admin using a browser and make a backup of your FreePBX components. Access Admin -> Backup & Restore and click Backup Wizard. Give the backup a name and description: incrediblepbx. Choose to run the backup Monthly. Choose Yes for voicemails, recordings, and CDR data. Choose Email Notifications and enter your email address. For Remote Save, choose No. Your backup will be saved locally in /var/spool/asterisk/backup/incrediblepbx. Click Finish.

Click the Pencil icon under incrediblepbx Actions to edit the files to be backed up. Using the + icon, make your Items list look like the following:

Click Save & Run button when you've made the necessary changes to kick off the backup. Unless you want monthly backups, you can click the trashcan icon under incrediblepbx Actions to remove the task we just created once the backup completes.

Copy the backup file from /var/spool/asterisk/backup/incrediblepbx to your desktop PC.

Restoring Your Data to Incredible PBX 16-15

Now let's continue on the Incredible PBX 16-15.2 server. Login to the GUI as admin using your favorite browser. From the FreePBX Dashboard, choose Admin -> Backup & Restore. Click the Restore tab. Click on Upload a Backup File and choose the backup file from your desktop. Once the backup is loaded, click Restore with CDR Data button to begin. When the whirring stops, there may be an error message. Just ignore it. Return to the Dashboard. Clear the warning about Bind Ports. It's incorrect. Your setup was copied correctly with chan_SIP on UDP 5060 and PJsip on UDP 5061 (unless you changed them). You now can use your browser to review your setup and verify that your 13-13 data came over correctly. Finally, verify that voicemail settings for your extensions got properly configured, and you should be good to go with Incredible PBX 16-15. Enjoy!

Where To Go From Here

Complete documentation on the FreePBX GPL Modules is available here.

Complete documentation on the Incredible PBX additions is available here.

An introduction to configuring extensions, trunks, and routes is available here.

Originally published: Monday, September 16, 2019



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

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The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Interconnect Incredible PBX 16-15 to the Asterisk Mothership

The Holy Grail for a mobile VoIP solution is a simple way to connect back to your primary Asterisk® PBX via Wi-Fi from anywhere in the world to make and receive calls as if you never left. Let’s tick off the potential problems. First, many home-based PBXs are sitting behind NAT-based routers. Second, almost all remote Wi-Fi connections are made through a NAT-based router. Third, chances are the remote hosting platform blocks outgoing email from downstream servers such as a mobile PBX. Fourth, deciphering the IP address of your remote connection can be problematic. Fifth, the chances of experiencing one-way audio or no audio on your VoIP calls is high because of NAT-based routers at both ends of your connection.

For those that travel regularly and want to avoid the complexity of configuring OpenVPN, here is a quick thumbnail of the setup we recommend as your mobile companion. You’ll never have a one-way audio problem again. In terms of hardware, you’ll need a Raspberry Pi 4B or 3B+ with its native WiFi support plus a Windows or Mac notebook computer for traveling. You’ll also need a NeoRouter VPN server to make this process seamless. If you’ve already set up an OpenVPN server platform, it will work equally well. One advantage of NeoRouter is that clients can be added from the client side without having to create a config file on the VPN server. All you need is a username and password. But the choice of VPN platform is totally a matter of preference. The objective using either OpenVPN or NeoRouter is secure communications to your home base. We don’t want to have to reconfigure either your home PBX or your traveling Raspberry Pi or your notebook PC based upon changes in your public and private IP addresses.

Today we’ll walk you through the easiest way to set up a (free) NeoRouter server on the Internet. It can be used to connect up to 254 devices on an encrypted private LAN. We’re delighted to have finally found a perfect use for the (free) Google Cloud instance.


Using a Raspberry Pi, build an Incredible PBX 16-15 platform by following our previous tutorial. We’ll set this up on your home WiFi network so that you only have to throw the Raspberry Pi and its power supply in your suitcase when you travel. As part of the setup, we’ll download NeoRouter and activate private IP addresses for your notebook computer as well as both of your PBXs (using nrclientcmd). Next, we’ll interconnect the two PBXs using SIP trunks and the NeoRouter private LAN IP addresses. We’ll take advantage of a neat little Raspberry Pi trick by storing a wpa_supplicant.conf template on your PC for the remote WiFi setup even though we don’t yet know anything about the remote LAN. Once we know the SSID and password at the remote destination, we’ll use your notebook computer to edit the template and transfer the file to the /boot folder of your RasPi’s microSD card. When the card then is inserted and the RasPi is booted, it will automatically move the template to the proper /etc/wpa_supplicant folder to successfully activate your WiFi connection. We’ll also load links, a fast text-based browser, just in case you encounter a hotel that requires some sort of acknowledgement or password before establishing your WiFi connection to the Internet.

Setting Up a (free) NeoRouter Server in the Cloud

Because NeoRouter uses a star-based VPN architecture, that means the NeoRouter Server must always be available at the same IP address for all of the NeoRouter Clients (aka Nodes) to talk to. If you already have a cloud-based server that has a static IP address and can handle the traffic cop duties of NeoRouter Server, then that’s an ideal place to install NeoRouter Server. Simply download the Free flavor of NeoRouter Server that matches your existing platform and install it. Add an FQDN for your server’s IP address, and you’re all set. A detailed summary of available management options is included in our previous NeoRouter v2 article.

We devoted a couple weeks to Google Cloud instances, and it turned out to be a pretty awful platform for hosting Asterisk. But the free offering looks to be a perfect fit as a hosting platform for NeoRouter Server. You also won’t have to worry about Google going out of business anytime soon. So let us walk you through an abbreviated setup process on the Google Cloud platform. If you’re just getting started with Google Cloud, read our previous article to take advantage of Google’s generous $300 offer to get you started and to generally familiarize yourself with the mechanics of setting up an instance in the Google Cloud.

For NeoRouter Server, navigate to https://console.cloud.google.com. Click the 3-bar image in the upper left corner of your Dashboard. This exposes the Navigation Menu. In the COMPUTE section of the Dashboard, click Compute Engine -> VM Instances. Then click CREATE PROJECT and name it. Now click CREATE INSTANCE and Name it nrserver. The instance name becomes the hostname for your virtual machine. If you want to remain in the Free Tier, choose f1-micro instance as the Machine Type and choose a U.S. Region (us-central1, us-east1 or us-west1). For the Boot Disk, choose CentOS 6 and expand the disk storage to at least 20GB (30GB is available with the Free Tier). For the Firewall setting, leave HTTP and HTTPS disabled. Check your entries carefully and then click the Create button.

When your virtual machine instance comes on line, jot down the assigned public IP address. We’ll need it in a minute. Now click on the SSH pull-down tab and choose Open in a Browser Window. Now we need to set a root password and adjust the SSH settings so that you can login from your desktop computer using SSH or Putty:

sudo passwd root
su root
nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd_config

When the editor opens the SSH config file, add the following entries. Then save the file and restart SSH: service sshd restart

PermitRootLogin yes
PasswordAuthentication yes

You now should be able to log in to your instance as root from your desktop computer using SSH or Putty. Test it to be sure: ssh root@server-IP-address

Before we leave the Google Cloud Dashboard, let’s make the assigned public IP address permanent so that it doesn’t get changed down the road. Keep in mind that, if you ever delete your instance, you also need to remove the assigned static IP address so you don’t continue to get billed for it. From Home on the Dashboard, scroll down to the NETWORKING section and choose VPS Network -> External IP Addresses. Change the Type of your existing address to Static and Name it staticip. Next, choose Firewall Rules in the VPS Network section and click CREATE FIREWALL RULE. Fill in the template like the following leaving the other fields with their default entries. Then click CREATE.

  1. Name: neorouter
  2. Target Tags: neorouter
  3. Source IP Range: 0.0.0.0/0
  4. Protocols/Ports: check tcp: 32976

CAUTION: Before this firewall rule will be activated for your instance, it also must be specified in the Network Tags section for your instance. Shut down your instance and add the neorouter tag by editing your instance. Then restart your instance.

Now we’re ready to install NeoRouter Free v2 Server on your instance. Be sure to choose the Free v2 variety. Log back into your server as root using SSH/Putty and issue these commands:

yum -y update
yum -y install nano
wget http://download.neorouter.com/Downloads/NRFree/Update_2.3.1.4360/Linux/CentOS/nrserver-2.3.1.4360-free-centos-x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh nrserver-2.3.1.4360-free-centos-x86_64.rpm
/etc/rc.d/init.d/nrserver.sh restart
nrserver -setdomain <DOMAINNAME> <DOMAINPASSWORD>
nrserver -adduser <USERNAME> <PASSWORD> admin
nrserver -enableuser <USERNAME>
nrserver -showsettings

Finally, add the following command to /etc/rc.local so that NeoRouter Server gets started whenever your instance is rebooted:

echo "/etc/rc.d/init.d/nrserver.sh start" >> /etc/rc.local

Installing Incredible PBX 16-15 on a Raspberry Pi

We won’t regurgitate our Raspberry Pi tutorial. Simply follow the steps outlined there to acquire the necessary components and to get Incredible PBX 16-15 installed. We do want to stress the importance of getting WiFi working, configuring Exim to use your Gmail credentials as a smarthost, and making sure you added the email addition to /etc/rc.local so that you receive IP address information about your PBX whenever it is rebooted. If you skipped any of these steps, stop here and revisit the RasPi tutorial to complete those items.

Configuring NeoRouter Client on Your Computers

All flavors of Incredible PBX come with the NeoRouter client preinstalled. If your Asterisk-based home PBX is of another variety, you can install the NeoRouter Client matching the architecture of your server from here. Be sure to click on the NeoRouter Free v2 tab before making your selection. The other varieties are incompatible with the Free NeoRouter v2 Server installed above and are not free. Also be sure you match both the operating system and architecture of your server platform. Finally, make certain that TCP 32976 is whitelisted in your firewalls.

On Linux-based (non-GUI) platforms, setting up the NeoRouter Client is done by issuing the command: nrclientcmd. You’ll be prompted for your NeoRouter Server FQDN as well as your username and password credentials. Perform this procedure on both your home PBX and the Raspberry Pi.

To add your Windows or Mac notebook to the NeoRouter VPN, download the appropriate client and run the application which will prompt for your NeoRouter Server FQDN as well as your NeoRouter credentials. Once completed, you should see all three machines in your NeoRouter Free Client Dashboard: your PC as well as your home PBX and Raspberry Pi-based Incredible PBX. Make note of the private VPN addresses (10.0.0.X) of both your home PBX and your Raspberry Pi. These VPN addresses never change, and we’ll need them to interconnect your PBXs and to set up a softphone on your notebook computer.

Admininistrative Tools to Manage NeoRouter

Here are a few helpful commands for monitoring and managing your NeoRouter VPN.

To access your NeoRouter Linux client: nrclientcmd

To restart NeoRouter Linux client: /etc/rc.d/init.d/nrservice.sh restart

To restart NeoRouter Linux server: /etc/rc.d/init.d/nrserver.sh restart

To set domain: nrserver -setdomain YOUR-VPN-NAME domainpassword

For a list of client devices: nrserver -showcomputers

For a list of existing user accounts: nrserver -showusers

For the settings of your NeoRouter VPN: nrserver -showsettings

To add a user account: nrserver -adduser username password user

To add admin account: nrserver -adduser username password admin

For a complete list of commands: nrserver –help


Interconnecting Your Raspberry Pi and Home PBX

To keep things simple, our setup examples below assume the following NeoRouter VPN addresses: Home PBX (10.0.0.1) and Raspberry Pi (10.0.0.2). Using a browser, you’ll need to login to the GUI of your Home PBX and Raspberry Pi and add a Trunk to each PBX. Be sure to use the same secret on BOTH trunk setups. We don’t recommend forwarding incoming calls from your Home PBX to your Raspberry Pi because most folks won’t be sitting in their hotel room all day to answer incoming calls. Instead, add the number of your smartphone to a Ring Group on the Home PBX and don’t forget the # symbol at the end of the number. On the Raspberry Pi side, we are assuming that whenever a call is dialed from a registered softphone with the 9 prefix, the call will be sent to the Home PBX for call processing (without the 9). For example, 98005551212 would send 800-555-1212 to the Home PBX for outbound routing and 9701 would send 701 to the Home PBX for routing to the 701 extension. You can obviously adjust your dialplan to meet your own local requirements.

On the Home PBX, the chan_sip trunk entries should look like this:

Trunk Name: raspi-remote

PEER DETAILS

host=10.0.0.2
type=friend
context=from-internal
username=home-pbx
fromuser=home-pbx
secret=some-password
canreinvite=no
insecure=port,invite
qualify=yes
nat=yes

On the Raspberry Pi, the chan_sip trunk entries should look like this:

Trunk Name: home-pbx

PEER DETAILS

host=10.0.0.1
type=friend
context=from-internal
username=raspi-remote
fromuser=raspi-remote
secret=some-password
canreinvite=no
insecure=port,invite
qualify=yes
nat=yes

On the Raspberry Pi, add an Outbound Route named Out9-home-pbx pointed to home-pbx Trunk with the following Dial Patterns. For each Dial Pattern, prepend=blank and prefix=9:

dial string: 1NXXNXXXXXX  
dial string: NXXNXXXXXX  
dial string: *98X.
dial string: XXX
dial string: XXXX
dial string: XXXXX
  

Tweaking Your Raspberry Pi for WiFi Mobility

Typically, you don’t know the WiFi SSID or password of your destination location before you travel. Because you won’t be traveling with a monitor and keyboard for your Raspberry Pi, we needed some way to adjust the WiFi credentials on the microSD card to accommodate the destination WiFi network when you arrive. Luckily, the Raspberry Pi folks thought of a clever way to handle this. You can simply plug your microSD card into your notebook PC (Mac ALERT: Don’t forget your SD card dongle!) and add a wpa_supplicant.conf config file to the /boot directory on the card once you arrive at your destination and know the SSID and password of the local WiFi network. When the Raspberry Pi is subsequently booted, the operating system will move the config file to the /etc/wpa_supplicant directory so that your WiFi network will come on line. Here’s what a typical wpa_supplicant.conf file should look like using your actual credentials. The last network section handles open WiFi network connections (think: McDonald’s) if you want to enable them:

country=US
update_config=1

network={
 ssid="your-SSID"
 psk="your-SSID-password"
 key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
 scan_ssid=1
 priority=5
}

network={
 key_mgmt=NONE
 priority=1
}

The other gotcha is that some public WiFi networks require some type of web login procedure before you can actually access the Internet even though an IP address may have been assigned to your Raspberry Pi. To handle this situation, you’ll need a text-based web browser on the Raspberry Pi that can be accessed through your notebook PC using SSH and your Raspberry Pi’s VPN address. Our favorite is links which can be installed on your Raspberry Pi before you pack up.

apt-get install links -y

Once you arrive at your destination, connect both your notebook PC and Raspberry Pi to the same WiFi network, login to the RasPi with SSH at the VPN address assigned to your RasPi, and run links to start the browser. Press <esc> to access the links menu options. If you can’t access your RasPi at the VPN IP address, try its WiFi-assigned local IP address.

Adding a Softphone to Your Notebook PC

Last, but not least, you obviously need a way to make and receive calls once your Raspberry Pi is up and running at the remote site. We recommend installing a softphone on your Mac or PC notebook that connects to an extension on your Raspberry Pi using the VPN IP address of the Raspberry Pi. Using the VPN address assures that the connection will always be available regardless of the WiFi network’s local IP addresses. Everyone has their own favorite softphone, but here are some suggestions.

For Windows PCs, we recommend VitalPBX Communicator. It’s a free download from here.



Another good choice is YateClient which also is free. Download it from here. Run YateClient once you’ve installed it and enter the credentials for an extension on your Raspberry Pi. Then enter the VPN IP address of your server plus your extension’s password. Click OK to save your entries.

If you are a Mac user, another great no-frills softphone is Telephone. Just download and install it from the Mac App Store.

Adding a Softphone to Your Smartphone

We actually prefer adding a free softphone app to our smartphone. There are a number of alternatives on both the iOS and Android platforms. With iPhones and iPads, we’ve had great success with Acrobits Softphone, Grandstream Wave, Linphone, and Zoiper Lite. All are available in the App Store. For Android devices, our current favorite is the VitalPBX Communicator. Acrobits Groundwire is another good choice. But Grandstream Wave, Linphone, and Zoiper Lite also are available. Keep in mind that Zoiper also supports IAX connections to simplify NAT connections. And, on both platforms, don’t forget that Google now lets you make and receive calls using the new Google Voice app using your old Google Voice numbers that no longer work directly with Asterisk.

Enjoy your pain-free traveling!

Originally published: Monday, September 9, 2019



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Migrating Painlessly from Incredible PBX 13-13 to 16-15



Asterisk® 13 will be 6 years old this October. That’s like three lifetimes in VoIP years. So let’s face it. It’s time to start making plans to move on up. The latest LTS version is Asterisk 16 which gets you another 4+ years with security fixes. We won’t dwell on the shortcomings of PJsip in Asterisk 13 and the fact that chanSIP is getting long in the tooth. So the sooner you migrate the better off you will be. Thanks to the latest FreePBX® 15 Backup & Restore module and some great tips from @DavidFoxworth and @Kenn10 on the PIAF Forum, 16-15 migration should be painless. We’re a little late with this week’s article because we wanted to finish the script to also let you migrate your Call Detail Records as well. Now it’s soup.

If you’re just getting started with Incredible PBX® 16-15 then you’ll get all of today’s additions as part of your initial install. Just follow our this tutorial. If you want to deploy Incredible PBX 16-15 as a public server on the Internet, this tutorial will walk you through that upgrade.

Beginning the Incredible PBX 13-13 Migration

For anyone that’s been involved with Asterisk and FreePBX, you already know what a pain it was to move from one release to another. It’s still not quite automatic, but it’s damn close. You can’t perform an in-place migration to move from Asterisk 13 and FreePBX 13 to Asteerisk 16 with FreePBX 15. So you’ll need to first bring up an Incredible PBX 16-15.1 platform that is separate and apart from your already functioning Incredible PBX 13-13.10 server. Once you’ve done that, use add-ip to whitelist the IP address of your 13-13 server on the 16-15 PBX and whitelist the IP address of your 16-15 server on the 13-13 PBX. This will make it easy to copy files between the two servers.

In addition to the whitelisting procedure above, there are three more steps to complete on the Incredible PBX 13-13 server. First, you’ll need to update the backup module:

cd /root
./gpl-install-fpbx backup

Next, login to the GUI as admin using a browser and make a backup of your FreePBX components. Access Admin -> Backup & Restore and click Backup Wizard. Give the backup a name and description: incrediblepbx. Choose to run the backup Monthly. Choose Yes for voicemails, recordings, and CDR data. Choose Email Notifications and enter your email address. For Remote Save, choose No. Your backup will be saved locally in /var/spool/asterisk/backup/incrediblepbx. Click Finish.

Click the Pencil icon under incrediblepbx Actions to edit the files to be backed up. Using the + icon, make your Items list look like the following:

Click Save & Run button when you’ve made the necessary changes to kick off the backup. Unless you want monthly backups, you can click the trashcan icon under incrediblepbx Actions to remove the task we just created once the backup completes.

Copy the backup file from /var/spool/asterisk/backup/incrediblepbx to your desktop PC.

Finally, let’s back up your Call Detail Records (cdr/cel) which won’t get imported with the FreePBX 15 restore utility. Log in to the Linux CLI as root and issue the following commands to create the CDR backup and copy it to your 16-15 server. Replace the xx’s with the IP address of your 16-15 server.

cd /root
mysqldump -u root -ppassw0rd --single-transaction --quick \\ 
 --lock-tables=false asteriskcdrdb > asteriskcdr1313.sql
gzip asteriskcdr1313.sql
scp asteriskcdr1313.sql.gz root@xx.xx.xx.xx:/root/asteriskcdr1313.sql.gz

Restoring Your Data to Incredible PBX 16-15

Let’s begin on the Incredible PBX 16-15 server by logging into the Linux CLI as root. Issue the following commands to set up your server platform for the Incredible PBX 13-13 import. Unless you have just installed Incredible PBX 16-15 since 3 p.m. EDT today, be sure to perform all of the steps below. It won’t hurt to do it again just to be sure you have the latest and greatest code:

cd /root
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/newbackup16-15.tar.gz
tar zxvf newbackup16-15.tar.gz
rm -f newbackup16-15.tar.gz
./install-backup

Next, login to the GUI as admin using your favorite browser. The new FreePBX 15 backup module is still a little rough around the edges, but it will get the job done. And that’s what matters. From the FreePBX Dashboard, choose Admin -> Backup & Restore. Be prepared. It will blow up. Not to worry. Click the Back button on your browser once or twice to return to the FreePBX Dashboard. Now repeat the drill: Admin -> Backup & Restore. This time it will work. Now click the Restore tab. Click on Upload a Backup File and choose the backup file from your desktop. Once the backup is loaded, click RunRestore button to begin. When the whirring stops, there will be an error message. Ignore it. Don’t click anything just yet. Instead, drop down to the Linux CLI again and run: /root/restore-fix.

When it completes, return to the GUI and your browser, close the Restore dialog, and return to the Dashboard. Ignore the warning about Bind Ports. Click Settings->SIP Settings->SIP Settings (pj_sip) and scroll down to UDP. Click YES then Submit then Apply Config. We’re almost finished.

Return to the Linux CLI and run: /root/import-cdr1313 to import your 13-13 cdr and cel data. This will overwrite existing CDR data on your 16-15 server. If anyone needs to get it back, we’ll add the steps below in coming days. Stay tuned.

Known Issues with Incredible PBX 13-13 Imports

You now can use your browser to review your setup and verify that your 13-13 data came over. If you’re using CallerID Superfecta, you’ll need to enable it under Admin -> CID Superfecta. Next, access Applications -> Misc Applications and set the extension for Demo IVR to 3366. Save your settings and reload the dialplan when prompted. Be advised that Custom Destinations currently do not populate so you’ll need to cut-and-paste your entries from your 13-13 server. There should only be a few: Fax (HylaFax), Time of Day, and perhaps OutAnyWhere. OSS EndPoint Manager is not compatible with FreePBX 15 and will not be restored. Finally, verify that voicemail settings for your extensions got properly set. You may need to again enable voicemail, set a VM password, and configure email delivery of voicemails, if desired.

FIXED: Importing Ring Groups from 13-13 caused calls to fail unless Send Progress was set to No for each of the ring groups. This is no longer necessary. Voicemail data did not get restored properly. This has been fixed by running restore-fix script.

Managing CDR Data with Incredible PBX 16-15

Call Detail Records are stored in two tables in MySQL’s asteriskcdrdb database. Unlike in FreePBX 13, FreePBX 15 uses the InnoDB storage engine and a number of new fields in the cdr table so don’t attempt to merely restore your FreePBX 13 asteriskcdrdb database to FreePBX 15, or you will get a royal mess. Our conversion utility, import-cdr1313, makes it easy to migrate the data as explained above. What we didn’t do was restore any existing CDR data you may have already accumulated on your 16-15 server. But we did make a backup of the data which is stored in asteriskcdr1615new.sql. You can use this backup for two purposes. You can replace the CDR 13-13 data that we just imported with your original 16-15 data, or you can add your previous CDR 16-15 data to the 13-13 data. As stored, asteriskcdr1615new.sql will completely replace the existing contents of the asteriskcdrdb database using the command:

mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asteriskcdrdb < asteriskcdr1615new.sql

If you want to supplement the 13-13 CDR data that was imported with your previous 16-15 CDR data, it's a bit more complex. Begin by making a couple copies of the backup file and then we'll edit one of the new files:

cp asteriskcdr1615new.sql asteriskcdr1615bak.sql
cp asteriskcdr1615new.sql asteriskcdr1615supp.sql
nano -w asteriskcdr1615supp.sql

We need to delete two sections from the file. First, scroll down to Table structure for table `cdr`. Press Ctrl-K to cut (delete) every line until you reach Dumping data for table `cdr`. Second, scroll down further to Table structure for table `cel`. Press Ctrl-K to cut (delete) every line until you reach Dumping data for table `cel`. Now Save the modified file: Ctrl-X, Y, then ENTER. You now can append your previous 16-15 CDR data to the current CDR database with the following command:

mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asteriskcdrdb < asteriskcdr1615supp.sql

We're all human and sometimes mistakes are made. Not to worry. You can put Humpty back together again by starting with your original CDR database, adding the 13-13 CDR data again, and then supplementing it with your previous 16-15 data. Here's how.

mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asteriskcdrdb < asteriskcdr1615bak.sql
./import-cdr1313
cp asteriskcdr1615new.sql asteriskcdr1615supp.sql
# make required changes described above to asteriskcdr1615supp.sql
mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asteriskcdrdb < asteriskcdr1615supp.sql

Two other tips, and you'll be a CDR database expert. First, you can restore an empty (but functional) CDR database with this command:

mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asteriskcdrdb < asteriskcdrdb.sql

Finally, you can make a backup of your existing CDR database at any time with the command:

mysqldump -u root -ppassw0rd --single-transaction --quick \\
 --lock-tables=false asteriskcdrdb > asteriskcdr1615latest.sql

Originally published: Monday, July 29, 2019



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Deploying an Incredible PBX 16-15 Public Server with Skyetel



Safely deploying a public-facing Asterisk® server with full FreePBX® functionality has become the Holy Grail for Nerd Vittles in 2019. Today we tackle it on our new Incredible PBX® 16-15 platform featuring the latest releases of Asterisk 16 and FreePBX 15. The icing on today’s cake is a terrific new offer from Skyetel that supplements the current Nerd Vittles BOGO offer of up to $500 in half-priced VoIP services. Beginning today, Skyetel also will start you off with a $10 credit just for opening an account here. Then, after you have had an opportunity to kick the tires and perhaps purchase a DID for a buck, you can make $9 worth of phone calls before deciding whether to take advantage of the BOGO special by making a purchase of up to $250 and having Skyetel match your contribution. Once you have funded your account, you then can also take advantage of Skyetel’s free number porting offer for the next 60 days. To get your $10 credit, just open a ticket and request the $10 Nerd Vittles credit once you’ve signed up. To get the Nerd Vittles BOGO price match and take advantage of free number porting, simply open another ticket once you have added up to $250 to your account. Effective 10/1/2023, $25/month minimum spend required.

Making the Case for a Public-Facing PBX

We’ve had some of our pioneers trying out the new Incredible PBX 16-15-PUBLIC implementation this past week, and the question arose as to why anyone would want to do this. After all, PBX in a Flash 3 and Incredible PBX for the better part of a decade have been deployed with a whitelist using the Travelin’ Man 3 firewall, and there’s never been a security issue. So why switch horses now? The short answer is mobile users with dynamic IP addresses. If all the users of your PBX are sitting behind the same NAT-based router with static IP addresses, the Travelin’ Man 3 design is perfect. The bad guys could never even see your server. But if some of your users either reside or travel outside your home base or if you want calls to follow you on your smartphone when you leave home or the office, then Travelin’ Man 3 blocked SIP access from these remote phones until their new IP addresses were whitelisted. Multiply this by dozens or hundreds of users, and network management suddenly became a full-time job. Yes, we’ve had tools such as dynamic DNS and PortKnocker to ease the pain, but it still was a knuckle-drill for mobile users. And, in today’s world, much of the workforce is quickly morphing into mobile users without a traditional desk at an office.

The world also is becoming more SIP savvy. Just as folks are learning that a $35 antenna can provide an awesome collection of 4K Ultra HD TV channels without the expense of a monthly cable bill, others are learning that a SIP telephone or softphone app on your smartphone can provide free calls to and from anybody with a SIP URI without sharing your communications with Facebook or Microsoft. Today’s PUBLIC PBX makes free worldwide SIP calling a reality.

Building the Base Platform for Incredible PBX PUBLIC

To get started today, you need to begin by installing Incredible PBX 16-15 using the latest tutorial. There still are a few bugs in the FreePBX 15 fax module so you won’t be able to successfully install and use Incredible Fax for the time being. We’ll let everyone know when the issues have been resolved.

Once you have set up your Incredible PBX 16-15.2 server, the next step is to assign one or two fully-qualified domain names (FQDNs) to your server. You can have one FQDN for registering SIP extensions and a different one for anonymous SIP (invites) access to your server, or you can use the same FQDN for both. Security through obscurity provides an extra layer of protection for your server so choose your FQDNs carefully. sip.yourname.com provides almost no protection while f246g.yourname.com pretty much assures that nobody is going to guess your domain name. This is particularly important with the FQDN for SIP registrations because registered extensions on your PBX can obviously make phone calls that cost money.

By default, Incredible PBX 16-15 configures five extensions (701-705) and a Ring Group for those extensions (777) as well as four trunks including Skyetel. It’s ready to make and receive calls as soon as you sign up with one of the four providers listed in the tutorial. You can add as many additional providers and extensions as you like and modify the ring group to meet your needs. To get started, be sure to configure the correct time zone for your server as this affects delivery of reminders. Run /root/timezone-setup. Next, set a secure password for admin access to the FreePBX GUI modules. Run /root/admin-pw-change. Then set a secure password for admin access to web applications such as AsteriDex, Reminders, and User Control Panel. Run /root/apache-pw-change. In addition to reviewing your extensions and ring group, review the default inbound route and choose the destination for the incoming calls from your provider. Finally, configure the outbound route to use the provider sequence desired. By default, it uses Skyetel for outbound calls.

Going Public with Incredible PBX 16-15

Once you’ve tested making and receiving calls with your new server, you’re ready to convert it into a public-facing PBX. In order to run the install script below, you’ll need your FQDNs that you chose above, plus a port number for future SSH/Putty access to your server, plus a list of the extensions you wish to make available for public access to your PBX. These whitelisted extensions can be reached via SIP URI from anywhere in the world by anybody. It works just like your old MaBell phone. Anybody, anywhere can dial your number. What’s changed is now the calls are free. So choose your list carefully. We recommend using the year you were born for your SSH port to keep things simple for you. Once the GO-PUBLIC-16-15 script has been run, you can only access your PBX via SSH/Putty at the new port, e.g. SSH -p 1990 root@yourFQDN.com

Now we’re ready to run the install script. It takes less than a minute. Before you begin, log out of ALL SIP extensions you have previously registered with Incredible PBX and change the server destination from an IP address to the FQDN you plan to assign to SIP registrations. Otherwise, these IP addresses will get banned while the install script is running below!

cd /root
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/go-public-16-15.tar.gz
tar zxvf go-public-16-15.tar.gz
rm -f go-public-16-15.tar.gz
./GO-PUBLIC-16-15

A Few Words About Incredible PBX PUBLIC Security

As with all Incredible PBX servers, Incredible PBX 16-15-PUBLIC includes the Automatic Update Utility. Please don’t disable it. It’s our only way to push updates to you if some vulnerability is discovered down the road. It gets run whenever you login to your server as root using SSH/Putty. Do so regularly and follow us on Twitter for security alerts. There’s also an Incredible PBX RSS Feed that is displayed when you login to the Incredible PBX GUI with a browser. It, too, includes security alerts and should be checked regularly. It’s your phone bill.

Incredible PBX 16-15-PUBLIC uses the ipset utility in conjunction with the IPtables firewall to block several countries that have inordinately high concentrations of folks that try to break into VoIP servers. In addition, your public PBX includes the VoIP Blacklist which includes another 100,000 bad guys from around the globe. These blacklists get updated every night by a script which is run from /etc/crontab. For your own safety, don’t disable or delete /etc/update-voipbl.sh or the other components upon which it relies.

Here are some other things you should do regularly to assure that your server remains secure. Login via SSH/Putty as root and check pbxstatus after the Automatic Update Utility is run. With the exception of the fax components, all the other items should be green all the time. From the Linux CLI, run: iptables -nL. This will show your firewall rules and whether any IP addresses have been banned by Fail2Ban. If there are banned IP addresses that are not your own, please open a thread on the PIAF Forum and let us know about it. If there are dozens of banned IP addresses, shutdown your server immediately until the problem is identified and resolved. If the IP addresses happen to be your own users because of using incorrect passwords or because of using a server IP address instead of its FQDN for SIP registrations, unban the IP address: fail2ban-client set asterisk unbanip xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Finally, watch the Asterisk CLI periodically for abnormal activity: asterisk -rvvvvvvvvvv

Tightening Up SSH Server Access

You obviously need a very secure root password for access to your server using SSH/Putty. Changing the TCP port for SSH access avoids the script kiddies, but it doesn’t offer much protection from a determined cracker. SSH login attempts are monitored by Fail2Ban, but Fail2Ban has issues when a determined intruder is using a powerful computing platform such as Amazon EC2. The more prudent solution is to disable SSH port access and use SSH Public Key Authentication as documented in the linked tutorial. Always, always use ssh-copy-id to copy your credentials to more than one desktop machine so that you don’t inadvertently lock yourself out of your PBX in the case of a hardware failure.

Introducing the VitalPBX Communicator

Our previous article offered some suggestions for SIP softphones. These become more important once you deploy a public-facing PBX and want to stay connected while you’re away from home or the office. If you’re using an Android smartphone even without a SIM card and provider, there is no finer softphone than the new VitalPBX Communicator. Using the Account Assistant, enter the SIP extension of your PBX as the Username. Enter the SIP extension password as the Password. For the Domain, enter the SIP registration FQDN you specified above (not the IP address of your server!). Choose UDP for the Transport. And click Login to begin. In the Network Settings, turn OFF WiFi only. If you enable Background Mode and Start At Boot Time in Advanced Settings, the softphone will remain registered and available even when you’re using other applications. On a Google Pixel 3, this consumes about 20% of the phone’s battery life from a full charge. A similar app is available for Windows-based PCs. An iPhone app is under development.

For other platforms, the Linphone application is an excellent alternative. See our previous Linphone tutorial for details. Here are the download links for each supported platform:

A Word to the Wise. Our experience suggests that SIP communications with an iPhone is notoriously awful. Under identical conditions using the same application on both an iPhone and an Android phone typically results in calls failing or experiencing one-way or no audio on the iPhone. Save yourself some frustration and purchase ANY Android phone for SIP communications (HINT: With the exception of the camera, the Moto g6 is virtually identical in shape and performance to Google’s Pixel 3 at less than one-third the cost). As noted, no SIM card is required. WiFi works perfectly. If you want a cell phone provider, check out Mint Mobile’s dirt cheap offering ($15/mo. for unlimited calls and text plus 3GB of LTE data). Nerd Vittles (and you) receive a perk when you use our link to sign up for service.

Special Thanks: We want to give an extra special tip of the hat to the PIAF Forum members who assisted in working the kinks out of the last two weeks’ Incredible PBX 16-15 offerings. We also wish to thank JavaPipe LLC for a number of DDOS tips and tricks in securing CentOS 7 with IPtables.

Originally published: Monday, July 22, 2019



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Enchilada Amore: It’s Incredible PBX 16-15 for CentOS 7

Just when you thought the VoIP community was running out of open source offerings, along comes last week’s Incredible PBX 16® LITE and today’s Incredible PBX 16-15 for CentOS® 7 featuring the same great feature set as the LITE version including Asterisk 16®. And now you also get the entire FreePBX® 15 GPL module collection including their new User Control Panel (UCP) and a much enhanced web GUI plus the entire Incredible PBX feature set. As with Incredible PBX LITE, it’s plug-and-play with immediate calling capability using any of four commercial SIP providers. Or you can choose one of 16 other preconfigured SIP providers, enter your credentials, and enjoy instant connectivity without worrying about SIP settings. We began the Incredible PBX 16 adventure last week. Let’s catch you up if you’re just joining.

UPDATE: A new release of Incredible PBX 16-15 is now available here. It resolves most issues with migration from Incredible PBX 13-13.

UPDATE: Turn your Incredible PBX 16-15 server into a secure public-facing PBX. Here’s how.

What’s Included? Incredible PBX 16-15 serves up a VoIP powerhouse featuring Asterisk 16, the FreePBX 15 GPL platform including User Control Panel (UCP), an Apache web server, the latest MariaDB SQL server (formerly MySQL), SendMail, and the Incredible PBX feature set including SIP, SMS, Opus, voice recognition, PicoTTS Text-to-Speech VoIP applications plus fax support, Click-to-Dial, News, Weather, Reminders, ODBC, and hundreds of features that typically are found in commercial PBXs: Conferencing, IVRs and AutoAttendants, Email Delivery of Voicemail, and much more.

Choosing a SIP Provider. Incredible PBX 16-15 comes preconfigured with support for five SIP extensions and four of the major SIP providers: Skyetel, VoIP.ms, V1VoIP, and Anveo Direct. We obviously hope you’ll choose Skyetel not only because they financially support Nerd Vittles and our open source projects, but also because it is a clearly superior platform offering crystal-clear communications and triple-redundancy so you never miss a call. Skyetel also sets itself apart from the other providers in the support department. They actually respond to issues, and there’s never a charge. As the old saying goes, they may not be the cheapest, but you get what you pay for. Even without taking advantage of Nerd Vittles half-price offer on up to $500 of Skyetel services, they’re still dirt cheap compared to the Bell Sisters and cable companies. Traditional DIDs are $1 per month. Outbound conversational calls are $0.012 per minute. Incoming conversational calls are a penny a minute, and CallerID lookups are $0.004. With all four providers, you only pay for minutes you use. Using more than one is a good idea.

Choosing a Platform for Incredible PBX 16-15

As with our other open source offerings, the platform choice for Incredible PBX 16-15 depends upon a number of factors. For most folks, you’d be crazy to go out and purchase hardware to use in your home or office when cloud-based platforms are available for about a dollar a month. Unless you plan to publicly expose your server on the Internet to facilitate remote SIP connections, the OpenVZ offerings below are perfectly adequate while in business with the cautionary note that you need off-site backups AND a tested backup plan. Three providers previously listed have closed their doors in 2019. You’ve been warned.

ProviderRAMDiskBandwidthPerformance as of 12/1/19Cost
CrownCloud KVM (LA)1GB20GB +
Snapshot
1TB/month598Mb/DN 281Mb/UP
2CPU Core
$25/year
Best Buy!
Naranjatech KVM (The Netherlands)1GB20GB1TB/monthHosting since 2005
VAT: EU res.
20€/year w/code:
SBF2019
BudgetNode KVM (LA)1GB40GB RAID101TB/monthAlso available in U.K PM @Ishaq on LET before payment$24/year
FreeRangeCloud KVM (Ashburn VA, Winnipeg, Freemont CA)1GB20GB SSD3TB/monthPick EGG loc'n
Open ticket for last 5GB SSD
$30/year w/code:
LEBEGG30

Installing Incredible PBX 16-15 with CentOS 7

If you’ve installed previous iterations of Incredible PBX, today’s drill is similar. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the install procedure for Incredible PBX 16-15. Begin by installing a minimal CentOS 7 (64-bit) platform or pick the CentOS 7 option with 1GB RAM and 20GB of storage from your cloud provider’s menu of choices. Then log into your server as root and issue the following commands:

passwd
yum -y update
yum -y install net-tools nano wget tar
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx16-15.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf incrediblepbx16-15.1.tar.gz
rm -f incrediblepbx16-15.1.tar.gz
# to add swap file on non-OpenVZ cloud platforms with no swap file
./create-swapfile-DO
# kick off Phase I install
./IncrediblePBX16-15.sh
# after reboot, kick off Phase II install
./IncrediblePBX16-15.sh
# add HylaFax/AvantFax, if desired
./incrediblefax16.sh
# set desired timezone
./timezone-setup
# display your passwords
./show-passwords
# remember to enable TUN/TAP if using VPS Control Panel with OpenVZ
# reconfigure PortKnocker if installing on an OpenVZ platform
echo 'OPTIONS="-i venet0:0"' >> /etc/sysconfig/knockd
service knockd restart
# set up NeoRouter VPN client, if desired
nrclientcmd
# check network speed
wget -O speedtest-cli https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py
chmod +x speedtest-cli
./speedtest-cli

WebMin is also installed and configured as part of the base install. The root password for access is the same as your Linux root password. We strongly recommend that you not use WebMin to make configuration changes to your server. You may inadvertently damage the operation of your PBX beyond repair. WebMin is an excellent tool to LOOK at how your server is configured. When used for that purpose, we highly recommend WebMin as a way to become familiar with your Linux configuration.

Planning Ahead for That Rainy Day

If you haven’t already learned the hard way, let us save you from a future shock. Hardware fails. All of it. So spend an extra hour now so that you’ll be prepared when (not if) disaster strikes. First, once you have your new PBX configured the way you plan to use it, make a backup of your PBX by running the Incredible Backup script: /root/incrediblebackup16

Copy down the name of the backup file that was created. You’ll need it in a few minutes.

Second, build yourself an identical VirtualBox platform on your desktop PC. It’s the same steps as outlined above.

Next, create a /backup folder on your VirtualBox PBX and copy the backup file from your main server to your VirtualBox server and restore it after logging in to VirtualBox PBX as root:

mkdir /backup
scp root@main-pbx-ip-address:/backup/backup-file-name.tar.gz /backup/.
/root/incrediblerestore16 /backup/backup-file-name.tar.gz

Complaints that you "forgot" to make a backup and your hardware has failed or your provider has gone out of business are not welcomed. We’re sorry for your loss. Case closed.

Completing the Incredible PBX Setup Procedure

Unless your desktop PC and server are both on the same private LAN, the install procedure should be performed from a desktop PC using SSH or Putty. This will insure that your desktop PC is also whitelisted in the Incredible PBX firewall. Using the console to perform the install is NOT recommended as your desktop PC will not be whitelisted in the firewall. This may result in your not being able to log in to your server. Once you have network connectivity, log in to your server as root from a desktop PC using your root password. Accept the license agreement by pressing ENTER.

Kick off the Phase I install. Once your server reboots and you log back in as root, start the Phase II install. All of your passwords will be randomly assigned with the exception of the root user Linux password. You can set it at any time by issuing the command: passwd. With the exception of your root user password, the remaining passwords can be displayed using the command: /root/show-passwords.

Finally, if your PBX is sitting behind a NAT-based router, you’ll need to redirect incoming UDP 5060 and UDP 10000-20000 traffic to the private IP address of your PBX. This is required for all of the SIP providers included in the Incredible PBX 16-15 default build. Otherwise, inbound calls will fail.

Configuring Skyetel for Incredible PBX 16-15

If you’ve decided to go with Skyetel, here’s the drill. Sign up for Skyetel service and take advantage of the Nerd Vittles BOGO special. First, complete the Prequalification Form here. You then will be provided a link to the Skyetel site to complete your registration. Once you have registered on the Skyetel site and your account has been activated, open a support ticket and request the BOGO credit for your account by referencing the Nerd Vittles special offer. Skyetel will match your deposit of up to $250 which gets you up to $500 of helf-price calling. Credit is limited to one per person/company/address/location. Effective 10/1/2023, $25/month minimum spend required.

Skyetel does not use SIP registrations to make connections to your PBX. Instead, Skyetel utilizes Endpoint Groups to identify which servers can communicate with the Skyetel service. An Endpoint Group consists of a Name, an IP address, a UDP or TCP port for the connection, and a numerical Priority for the group. For incoming calls destined to your PBX, DIDs are associated with an Endpoint Group to route the calls to your PBX. For outgoing calls from your PBX, a matching Endpoint Group is required to authorize outbound calls through the Skyetel network. Thus, the first step in configuring the Skyetel side for use with your PBX is to set up an Endpoint Group. Here’s a typical setup for Incredible PBX 16-15:

  • Name: MyPBX
  • Priority: 1
  • IP Address: PBX-Public-IP-Address
  • Port: 5060
  • Protocol: UDP
  • Description: my.incrediblepbx.com

To receive incoming PSTN calls, you’ll need at least one DID. On the Skyetel site, you acquire DIDs under the Phone Numbers tab. You have the option of Porting in Existing Numbers (free for the first 60 days after you sign up for service) or purchasing new ones under the Buy Phone Numbers menu option.

Once you have acquired one or more DIDs, navigate to the Local Numbers or Toll Free Numbers tab and specify the desired SIP Format and Endpoint Group for each DID. Add SMS/MMS and E911 support, if desired. Call Forwarding and Failover are also supported. That completes the VoIP setup on the Skyetel side. System Status is always available here.

Configuring VoIP.ms for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for VoIP.ms service, may we suggest you use our signup link so that Nerd Vittles gets a referral credit for your signup. Once your account is set up, you’ll need to set up a SIP SubAccount and, for Authentication Type, choose Static IP Authentication and enter your Incredible PBX 16-15 server’s public IP address. For Transport, choose UDP. For Device Type, choose Asterisk, IP PBX, Gateway or VoIP Switch. Order a DID in their web panel, and then point the DID to the SubAccount you just created. Be sure to specify atlanta1.voip.ms as the POP from which to receive incoming calls.

Configuring V1VoIP for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for V1VoIP service, sign up on their web site. Then login to your account and order a DID under the DIDs tab. Once the DID has been assigned, choose View DIDs and click on the Forwarding button beside your DID. For Option #1, choose Forward to IP Address/PBX. For the Forwarding Address, enter the public IP address of your server. For the T/O (timeout) value, set it to 2o seconds. Then click the Update button. Under the Termination tab, create a new Endpoint with the public IP address of your server so that you can place outbound calls through V1VoIP.

Configuring Anveo Direct for Incredible PBX 16-15

To sign up for Anveo Direct service, sign up on their web site and then login. After adding funds to your account, purchase a DID under Inbound Service -> Order DID. Next, choose Configure Destination SIP Trunk. Give the Trunk a name. For the Primary SIP URI, enter $[E164]$@server-IP-address. For Call Options, select your new DID from the list. You also must whitelist your public IP address under Outbound Service -> Configure. Create a new Call Termination Trunk and name it to match your server. For Dialing Prefix, choose six alphanumeric characters beginning with a zero. In Authorized IP Addresses, enter the public IP address of your server. Set an appropriate rate cap. We like $0.01 per minute to be safe. Set a concurrent calls limit. We like 2. For the Call Routing Method, choose Least Cost unless you’re feeling extravagant. For Routes/Carriers, choose Standard Routes. Write down your Dialing Prefix and then click the Save button.

Before you can make outbound calls through Anveo Direct from your PBX, you first must configure the Dialing Prefix that you wrote down in the previous step. Log into the GUI as admin using a web browser and edit the Anveo-Out trunk in Connectivity -> Trunks. Click on the custom-Settings tab and replace anveo-pin with your actual Dialing Prefix. Click Submit and Apply Config to complete the setup.

By default, incoming Anveo Direct calls will be processed by the Default inbound route on your PBX. If you wish to redirect incoming Anveo Direct calls using DID-specific inbound routes, then you’ve got a bit more work to do. In addition to creating the inbound route using the 11-digit Anveo Direct DID, enter the following commands after logging into your server as root using SSH/Putty:

cd /etc/asterisk
echo "[from-anveo]" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,1,Ringing" >> extensions_custom.conf
echo "exten => _.,n,Goto(from-trunk,\\${SIP_HEADER(X-anveo-e164)},1)" >> extensions_custom.conf
asterisk -rx "dialplan reload"

Configuring a Softphone for Incredible PBX 16-15

We’re in the home stretch now. You can connect virtually any kind of telephone to your new PBX. Plain Old Phones require an analog telephone adapter (ATA) which can be a separate board in your computer from a company such as Digium. Or it can be a standalone SIP device such as ObiHai’s OBi100 or OBi110 (if you have a phone line from Ma Bell to hook up as well). SIP phones can be connected directly so long as they have an IP address. These could be hardware devices or software devices such as the YateClient softphone. We’ll start with a free one today so you can begin making calls. You can find dozens of recommendations for hardware-based SIP phones both on Nerd Vittles and the PIAF Forum when you’re ready to get serious about VoIP telephony.

We recommend YateClient which is free. Download it from here. Run YateClient once you’ve installed it and enter the credentials for the 701 extension on Incredible PBX. You can find them by running /root/show-passwords. You’ll need the IP address of your server plus your extension 701 password. In the YateClient, fill in the blanks using the IP address of your Server, 701 for your Username, and whatever Password was assigned to the extension when you installed Incredible PBX. Click OK to save your entries.

Once you are registered to extension 701, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place some test calls to the numerous apps that are preconfigured on Incredible PBX. Dial a few of these to get started:

DEMO - Apps Demo
123 - Reminders
947 - Weather by ZIP Code
951 - Yahoo News
TODAY - Today in History
LENNY - The Telemarketer's Worst Nightmare

If you are a Mac user, another great no-frills softphone is Telephone. Just download and install it from the Mac App Store. For Android users, check out the terrific new VitalPBX Communicator. Works flawlessly with Incredible PBX.

Audio Issues with Incredible PBX 16-15

Only if you experience one-way or no audio on some calls, add your external IP address and LAN subnet in the GUI by navigating to Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. In the NAT Settings section, click Detect Network Settings. Click Submit and Apply Settings to save your changes.

Incredible PBX 16-15 Administration

We’ve eased the pain of administering your new PBX with a collection of scripts which you will find in the /root folder after logging in with SSH or Putty. Here’s a quick summary of what each of the scripts does.

add-fqdn is used to whitelist a fully-qualified domain name in the firewall. Because Incredible PBX 16-15 blocks all traffic from IP addresses that are not whitelisted, this is what you use to authorize an external user for your PBX. The advantage of an FQDN is that you can use a dynamic DNS service to automatically update the IP address associated with an FQDN so that you never lose connectivity.

add-ip is used to whitelist a public IP address in the firewall. See the add-fqdn explanation as to why this matters.

del-acct is used to remove an IP address or FQDN from the firewall’s whitelist.

reset-conference-pins is a script that automatically and randomly resets the user and admin pins for access to the preconfigured conferencing application. Dial C-O-N-F from any registered SIP phone to connect to the conference.

reset-extension-passwords is a script that automatically and randomly resets ALL of the SIP passwords for extensions 701-705. Be careful using this one, or you may disable existing registered phones and cause Fail2Ban to blacklist the IP addresses of those users. HINT: You can place a call to the Ring Group associated with all five extensions by dialing 777.

reset-reminders-pin is a script that automatically and randomly resets the pin required to access the Telephone Reminders application by dialing 123. It’s important to protect this application because a nefarious user could set up a reminder to call a number anywhere in the world assuming your SIP provider’s account was configured to allow such calls.

show-feature-codes is a cheat sheet for all of the feature codes which can be dialed from any registered SIP phone. It documents how powerful a platform Incredible PBX 16-15 actually is. A similar listing is available in the GUI at Admin -> Feature Codes.

show-passwords is a script that displays ALL of the passwords associated with Incredible PBX 16-15. This includes SIP extension passwords, voicemail pins, conference pins, telephone reminders pin, and your Anveo Direct outbound calling pin (if configured). Note that voicemail pins are configured by the user of a SIP extension the first time the user accesses the voicemail system by dialing *97.

update-IncrediblePBX is the Automatic Update Utility which checks for server updates from incrediblepbx.com every time you log into your server as root using SSH or Putty. Do NOT disable it as it is used to load important fixes and security updates when necessary. We recommend logging into your server at least once a week.

pbxstatus (shown above) displays status of all major components of Incredible PBX 16-15.

Forwarding Calls to Your Cellphone. Keep in mind that inbound calls to your DIDs automatically ring all five SIP extensions, 701-705. The easiest way to also ring your cellphone is to set one of these five extensions to forward incoming calls to your cellphone. After logging into your PBX as root, issue the following command to forward calls from extension 705 to your cellphone: asterisk -rx "database put CF 705 6781234567"

To remove call forwarding: asterisk -rx "database del CF 705"

Configuring SendMail with Incredible PBX 16-15

In order to receive voicemails by email delivery, outbound mail functionality from your server obviously is required. If you’ve deployed your server in your home, your Internet Service Provider probably blocks downstream mail servers such as Incredible PBX from sending mail. This is done to reduce SPAM. In this case, you will need to configure SendMail using either your ISP or Gmail as an SMTP Relay Host. Here are the steps using a Gmail account:

cd /etc/mail
yum -y install sendmail-cf
hostname -f > genericsdomain
touch genericstable
makemap -r hash genericstable.db < genericstable
mv sendmail.mc sendmail.mc.original
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/sendmail.mc.gmail
cp sendmail.mc.gmail sendmail.mc
mkdir -p auth
chmod 700 auth
cd auth
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" > client-info
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:587 \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" >> client-info
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:465 \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" >> client-info
# Stop here and edit client-info (nano -w client-info) in all three lines.
# Replace  user_id with your gMail account name without @gmail.com
# Replace password with your real gMail password
# Be sure to replace the double-quotes shown above if they don't appear in the file!!!
# Save your changes (Ctrl-X, Y, then Enter)
chmod 600 client-info
makemap -r hash client-info.db < client-info
cd ..
make
systemctl restart sendmail

If your server is hosted in the cloud and your provider does not block TCP port 25, then you can send mail without using a SmartHost; however, your server's hostname must actually be real or downstream mail servers will reject your mail. You can set your server's hostname like this: hostname myserver.myhost.com. This is usually sufficient; however, it's a good idea to also add the hostname in /etc/hostname and in /etc/hosts as the first entry on 127.0.0.1 line:

127.0.0.1   myserver.myhost.com pbx.local localhost localhost.localdomain

Next, test outbound mail using this command with your actual email address:

echo "test" | mail -s testmessage yourname@youremaildomain.com

Once you are sure your emails are being delivered reliably, here's a sample GUI voicemail configuration for an extension:



Getting Started with Incredible Fax 16

Believe it or not, there still are lots of folks that use faxes in their everyday lives. If you're one of them, Incredible PBX has your back. Begin by logging into your server as root and running incrediblefax16.sh to install HylaFax and AvantFax on your server. You'll be prompted a dozen or more times for information. Answer no to the secure fax question. For the rest of the prompts, just press ENTER to accept the default entries. Rebooting your server is required when the install finishes. Once your server is back on line, there will be a new AvantFax tab in the GUI. Before proceeding, be sure to set an Apache web apps password by running /root/apache-pw-change. Next, login to AvantFax with your browser. You first will be prompted for your Apache credentials. Enter admin for the username and whatever password you set up in the previous step. Then you will be prompted for your AvantFax credentials. The default is admin:password. After you enter the username and password, you will be prompted to change your admin password. The old password is still password. Then enter your desired password twice and save the setting. The AvantFax dashboard then will display. If nothing has come unglued, you should see four green Idle icons:



You can Send Faxes from within AvantFax by choosing the Send Fax tab, or you can use one of many HylaFax clients. Google is your friend.

Receiving faxes currently has issues not the least of which are fax detection being broken and incoming faxes never reaching the specified destination. We will continue to work on this and provide updates when they become available. For the time being, the simple workaround if you're using Skyetel as your provider is to designate a DID as a fax line (Call Routing: vFax) in the Skyetel Dashboard. Then Skyetel will manage the incoming faxes without any additional configuration on your PBX. You still can send faxes from within the AvantFax GUI.

Getting Started with ODBC for Asterisk

If you're new to the ODBC World, here's a quick primer. The idea behind Open Data Base Connectivity is to simplify the task of connecting up any flavor database management system so that it can talk to applications and foreign databases without having to write custom code to support every different DBMS. ODBC serves in much the same way as a translator who sits between you and foreign visitors. With the benefit of a translator, whatever is spoken is understood on both ends of the conversation. The real beauty of ODBC is that it is conversant with almost every DBMS offering on the planet including Oracle, Informix, SAS, MS Access, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Sybase, and even dBase, FoxPro, and XDB. All you really need is the ODBC connector for your operating system plus one or more database drivers for the DBMS data sources you wish to use.

Because the FreePBX modules are driven by MySQL tables, we've included the MySQL connector for Asterisk in Incredible PBX 16-15 together with two sample applications to get you started. If you add your own MySQL databases, it's easy to connect them with ODBC by simply running the odbc-gen.sh script in /root again. The two sample applications we've included will show you how to integrate ODBC queries into your Asterisk dialplan. The code is available in odbc.conf in the /etc/asterisk folder. The first sample is a typical employee database. By dialing 222, you will be prompted to enter the employee number (12345), and the ODBC app then will look up the employee number and read you the name of the employee. The second sample is a speed dialer using the AsteriDex database. The sample entries in the database include a 3-numeric-digit DIALCODE which simply matches the first three letters of each AsteriDex name spelled out on a phone, e.g. 335 = DELta Airlines and 263 = AMErican Airlines. As you add new entries to AsteriDex, you can add dialcodes in the same way or in any other scheme you prefer. Once you have signed up with a provider so that you can make outbound calls, just dial 223 and enter the AsteriDex dialcode to place the call. Think of it as a Speed Dialer on Steroids.

Where To Go From Here

Complete documentation on the FreePBX GPL Modules is available here.

Complete documentation on the Incredible PBX additions is available here.

An introduction to configuring extensions, trunks, and routes is available here.

Originally published: Monday, July 15, 2019



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Introducing Incredible PBX 16 LITE for CentOS 7



We had a banner week with the introduction of Incredible PBX® LITE for Raspbian 10. What we heard privately from many users was that they’d always wanted a turnkey PBX that was preconfigured to make and receive calls. The irony of offering this platform without the FreePBX® GUI to celebrate Independence Day was not lost on many of our savvy supporters. And, while the bells and whistles were icing on the cake, many simply wanted a flexible VoIP platform that didn’t require going back to college. This week we’re upping the ante by introducing a similar Incredible PBX LITE platform for CentOS® 7 with a few major enhancements. First, you get the new Asterisk® 16 LTS version which will keep you chugging along with bug fixes and security updates for the next 4+ years. Second, we’ve replaced FLITE with PicoTTS for a much improved (free) text-to-speech platform. And finally, we’ve added WebMin and all the other Incredible PBX components that make Incredible PBX incredible. Will there be a new release of Incredible PBX 16 with the FreePBX GUI modules? Absolutely. And there may be a few, new surprises along the way as well. Stay tuned!

What’s Included? Despite its name, Incredible PBX LITE still serves up a VoIP powerhouse featuring Asterisk 16, an Apache web server, the latest MariaDB SQL server (formerly MySQL), SendMail, and most of the Incredible PBX feature set including SIP, SMS, Opus, voice recognition, PicoTTS Text-to-Speech VoIP applications plus fax support, Click-to-Dial, News, Weather, Reminders, and hundreds of features that typically are found in commercial PBXs: Conferencing, IVRs and AutoAttendants, Email Delivery of Voicemail, and much more.

What’s Missing? We’ve removed the entire FreePBX GUI platform while retaining most of its design engineering and feature set. We’ve also eliminated the need to run a web server or database server although they’re still there. And gone are the days of having to configure extensions and trunks as well as inbound and outbound routes before you can actually use your PBX to make your first call. The tradeoff is a noticeable performance improvement.

Choosing a SIP Provider. Incredible PBX LITE comes preconfigured to support five SIP extensions and four of the major SIP providers: Skyetel, VoIP.ms, V1VoIP, and Anveo Direct. We obviously hope you’ll choose Skyetel not only because they financially support Nerd Vittles and our open source projects, but also because it is a clearly superior platform offering crystal-clear communications and triple-redundancy so you never miss a call. Skyetel also sets itself apart from the other providers in the support department. They actually respond to issues, and there’s never a charge. As the old saying goes, they may not be the cheapest, but you get what you pay for. Even without taking advantage of Nerd Vittles half-price offer on up to $500 of Skyetel services, they’re still dirt cheap compared to the Bell Sisters and cable companies. Traditional DIDs are $1 per month. Outbound conversational calls are $0.012 per minute. Incoming conversational calls are a penny a minute, and CallerID lookups are $0.004. With all four providers, you only pay for minutes you use. Using more than one is a good idea.

Choosing a Platform for Incredible PBX 16 LITE

As with our other open source offerings, the platform choice for Incredible PBX 16 LITE depends upon a number of factors. For most folks, you’d be crazy to go out and purchase hardware to use in your home or office when cloud-based platforms are available for about a dollar a month. Unless you plan to publicly expose your server on the Internet to facilitate remote SIP connections, the OpenVZ offerings below are perfectly adequate while in business with the cautionary note that you need off-site backups AND a tested backup plan. Three providers previously listed have closed their doors in 2019. You’ve been warned.

ProviderRAMDiskBandwidthPerformance as of 12/1/19Cost
CrownCloud KVM (LA)1GB20GB +
Snapshot
1TB/month598Mb/DN 281Mb/UP
2CPU Core
$25/year
Best Buy!
Naranjatech KVM (The Netherlands)1GB20GB1TB/monthHosting since 2005
VAT: EU res.
20€/year w/code:
SBF2019
BudgetNode KVM (LA)1GB40GB RAID101TB/monthAlso available in U.K PM @Ishaq on LET before payment$24/year
FreeRangeCloud KVM (Ashburn VA, Winnipeg, Freemont CA)1GB20GB SSD3TB/monthPick EGG loc'n
Open ticket for last 5GB SSD
$30/year w/code:
LEBEGG30

Installing Incredible PBX 16 LITE with CentOS 7

If you’ve installed previous iterations of Incredible PBX, today’s drill is similar. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the install procedure for Incredible PBX 16 LITE. Begin by installing a minimal CentOS 7 (64-bit) platform or pick the CentOS 7 option with 1GB RAM and 20GB of storage from your cloud provider’s menu of choices. Then log into your server as root and issue the following commands:

passwd
yum -y update
yum -y install net-tools nano wget tar
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx-16-LITE.tar.gz
tar zxvf incrediblepbx-16-LITE.tar.gz
rm -f incrediblepbx-16-LITE.tar.gz
# to add swap file on non-OpenVZ cloud platforms with no swap file
./create-swapfile-DO
# kick off Phase I install
./IncrediblePBX16-LITE.sh
# after reboot, kick off Phase II install
./IncrediblePBX16-LITE.sh
# add HylaFax/AvantFax, if desired
./incrediblefax13.sh
# set desired timezone
./timezone-setup
# set new extension passwords
./reset-extension-passwords
# remember to enable TUN/TAP if using VPS Control Panel with OpenVZ
# reconfigure PortKnocker if installing on an OpenVZ platform
echo 'OPTIONS="-i venet0:0"' >> /etc/sysconfig/knockd
service knockd restart
# set up NeoRouter VPN client, if desired
nrclientcmd
# check network speed
wget -O speedtest-cli https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py
chmod +x speedtest-cli
./speedtest-cli

Planning Ahead for That Rainy Day

If you haven’t already learned the hard way, let us save you from a future shock. Hardware fails. All of it. So spend an extra hour now so that you’ll be prepared when (not if) disaster strikes. First, once you have your new PBX configured the way you plan to use it, make a backup of your PBX by running the Incredible Backup script: /root/incrediblebackup13

Copy down the name of the backup file that was created. You’ll need it in a few minutes.

Second, build yourself an identical VirtualBox platform on your desktop PC. It’s the same steps as outlined above.

Next, create a /backup folder on your VirtualBox PBX and copy the backup file from your main server to your VirtualBox server and restore it after logging in to VirtualBox PBX as root:

mkdir /backup
scp root@main-pbx-ip-address:/backup/backup-file-name.tar.gz /backup/.
/root/incrediblerestore13 /backup/backup-file-name.tar.gz

Complaints that you "forgot" to make a backup and your hardware has failed or your provider has gone out of business are not welcomed. We’re sorry for your loss. Case closed.

Completing the Incredible PBX Setup Procedure

Unless your desktop PC and server are both on the same private LAN, the install procedure should be performed from a desktop PC using SSH or Putty. This will insure that your desktop PC is also whitelisted in the Incredible PBX firewall. Using the console to perform the install is NOT recommended as your desktop PC will not be whitelisted in the firewall. This may result in your not being able to log in to your server. Once you have network connectivity, log in to your server as root from a desktop PC using your root password. Accept the license agreement by pressing ENTER.

Kick off the Phase I install. Once your server reboots and you log back in as root, start the Phase II install. All of your passwords will be randomly assigned with the exception of the root user Linux password. You can set it at any time by issuing the command: passwd. With the exception of your root user password, the remaining passwords can be displayed using the command: /root/show-passwords.

Finally, if your PBX is sitting behind a NAT-based router, you’ll need to redirect incoming UDP 5060 and UDP 10000-20000 traffic to the private IP address of your PBX. This is required for all of the SIP providers included in the Incredible PBX LITE build. Otherwise, all inbound calls will fail.

Configuring Skyetel for Incredible PBX 16 LITE

If you’ve decided to go with Skyetel, here’s the drill. Sign up for Skyetel service and take advantage of the Nerd Vittles BOGO special. First, complete the Prequalification Form here. You then will be provided a link to the Skyetel site to complete your registration. Once you have registered on the Skyetel site and your account has been activated, open a support ticket and request the BOGO credit for your account by referencing the Nerd Vittles special offer. Skyetel will match your deposit of up to $250 which gets you up to $500 of helf-price calling. Credit is limited to one per person/company/address/location. Effective 10/1/2023, $25/month minimum spend required.

Skyetel does not use SIP registrations to make connections to your PBX. Instead, Skyetel utilizes Endpoint Groups to identify which servers can communicate with the Skyetel service. An Endpoint Group consists of a Name, an IP address, a UDP or TCP port for the connection, and a numerical Priority for the group. For incoming calls destined to your PBX, DIDs are associated with an Endpoint Group to route the calls to your PBX. For outgoing calls from your PBX, a matching Endpoint Group is required to authorize outbound calls through the Skyetel network. Thus, the first step in configuring the Skyetel side for use with your PBX is to set up an Endpoint Group. Here’s a typical setup for Incredible PBX LITE:

  • Name: MyPBX
  • Priority: 1
  • IP Address: PBX-Public-IP-Address
  • Port: 5060
  • Protocol: UDP
  • Description: lite1.incrediblepbx.com

To receive incoming PSTN calls, you’ll need at least one DID. On the Skyetel site, you acquire DIDs under the Phone Numbers tab. You have the option of Porting in Existing Numbers (free for the first 60 days after you sign up for service) or purchasing new ones under the Buy Phone Numbers menu option.

Once you have acquired one or more DIDs, navigate to the Local Numbers or Toll Free Numbers tab and specify the desired SIP Format and Endpoint Group for each DID. Add SMS/MMS and E911 support, if desired. Call Forwarding and Failover are also supported. That completes the VoIP setup on the Skyetel side. System Status is always available here.

Configuring VoIP.ms for Incredible PBX LITE

To sign up for VoIP.ms service, may we suggest you use our signup link so that Nerd Vittles gets a referral credit for your signup. Once your account is set up, you’ll need to set up a SIP SubAccount and, for Authentication Type, choose Static IP Authentication and enter your Incredible PBX LITE server’s public IP address. For Transport, choose UDP. For Device Type, choose Asterisk, IP PBX, Gateway or VoIP Switch. Order a DID in their web panel, and then point the DID to the SubAccount you just created. Be sure to specify atlanta1.voip.ms as the POP from which to receive incoming calls.

Configuring V1VoIP for Incredible PBX LITE

To sign up for V1VoIP service, sign up on their web site. Then login to your account and order a DID under the DIDs tab. Once the DID has been assigned, choose View DIDs and click on the Forwarding button beside your DID. For Option #1, choose Forward to IP Address/PBX. For the Fowarding Address, enter the public IP address of your server. For the T/O (timeout) value, set it to 2o seconds. Then click the Update button. Under the Termination tab, create a new Endpoint with the public IP address of your server so that you can place outbound calls through V1VoIP.

Configuring Anveo Direct for Incredible PBX LITE

To sign up for Anveo Direct service, sign up on their web site and then login. After adding funds to your account, purchase a DID under Inbound Service -> Order DID. Next, choose Configure Destination SIP Trunk. Give the Trunk a name. For the Primary SIP URI, enter $[E164]$@server-IP-address. For Call Options, select your new DID from the list. You also must whitelist your public IP address under Outbound Service -> Configure. Create a new Call Termination Trunk and name it to match your server. For Dialing Prefix, choose six alphanumeric characters beginning with a zero. In Authorized IP Addresses, enter the public IP address of your server. Set an appropriate rate cap. We like $0.01 per minute to be safe. Set a concurrent calls limit. We like 2. For the Call Routing Method, choose Least Cost unless you’re feeling extravagant. For Routes/Carriers, choose Standard Routes. Write down your Dialing Prefix and then click the Save button.

Before you can make outbound calls through Anveo Direct from your PBX, you first must configure the Dialing Prefix that you wrote down in the previous step. Newer downloads include an add-anveo-pin script to update your PIN in Incredible PBX. If you don’t have the script, login to your server as root and use nano to edit extensions_additional.conf in the /etc/asterisk directory. Search (Ctl-W) for anveo-pin and replace anveo-pin with the 6-digit alphanumeric PIN for your account. Press Ctrl-X, Y, then Enter to save your settings. Reload your dialplan with the command: asterisk -rx "dialplan reload"

Configuring a Softphone for Incredible PBX LITE

We’re in the home stretch now. You can connect virtually any kind of telephone to your new PBX. Plain Old Phones require an analog telephone adapter (ATA) which can be a separate board in your computer from a company such as Digium. Or it can be a standalone SIP device such as ObiHai’s OBi100 or OBi110 (if you have a phone line from Ma Bell to hook up as well). SIP phones can be connected directly so long as they have an IP address. These could be hardware devices or software devices such as the YateClient softphone. We’ll start with a free one today so you can begin making calls. You can find dozens of recommendations for hardware-based SIP phones both on Nerd Vittles and the PIAF Forum when you’re ready to get serious about VoIP telephony.

We recommend YateClient which is free. Download it from here. Run YateClient once you’ve installed it and enter the credentials for the 701 extension on Incredible PBX. You can find them by running /root/show-passwords. You’ll need the IP address of your server plus your extension 701 password. In the YateClient, fill in the blanks using the IP address of your Server, 701 for your Username, and whatever Password was assigned to the extension when you installed Incredible PBX. Click OK to save your entries.

Once you are registered to extension 701, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place some test calls to the numerous apps that are preconfigured on Incredible PBX. Dial a few of these to get started:

DEMO - Apps Demo
123 - Reminders
947 - Weather by ZIP Code
951 - Yahoo News
TODAY - Today in History
LENNY - The Telemarketer's Worst Nightmare

If you are a Mac user, another great no-frills softphone is Telephone. Just download and install it from the Mac App Store.

Audio Issues with Incredible PBX LITE

Only if you experience one-way or no audio on some calls, add your external IP address and LAN subnet in /etc/asterisk/sip_general_custom.conf like the following example:

nat=force_rport,comedia
externip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
localnet=192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0 

Then issue the following commands:

sed -i 's|nat=no|nat=force_rport,comedia|' /etc/asterisk/sip_additional.conf
systemctl restart asterisk

Displaying Formatted CDR Data

By default, web access is limited to whitelisted IP addresses so it’s safe to access your Call Detail Report (CDR) using a browser. Unfortunately, the only browser that currently handles this with automatic formatting is Firefox. To begin, install the FireCSV extension in Firefox. Next, log in to your server as root and change to the /var/www/html folder. Issue the command ln -s /var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/Master.csv mycdr.csv to create a symlink to your CSV data. Now you can access your CDR data with Firefox by navigating to http://server-ip/mycdr.csv.

There’s also a simple way to display CSV files from the Linux command line using this tip from StackOverflow:

column -s, -t < /var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/Master.csv | less -#2 -N -S

Incredible PBX LITE Administration

We've eased the pain of administering your new PBX with a collection of scripts which you will find in the /root folder after logging in with SSH or Putty. Here's a quick summary of what each of the scripts does.

add-fqdn is used to whitelist a fully-qualified domain name in the firewall. Because Incredible PBX LITE blocks all traffic from IP addresses that are not whitelisted, this is what you use to authorize an external user for your PBX. The advantage of an FQDN is that you can use a dynamic DNS service to automatically update the IP address associated with an FQDN so that you never lose connectivity.

add-ip is used to whitelist a public IP address in the firewall. See the add-fqdn explanation as to why this matters.

del-acct is used to remove an IP address or FQDN from the firewall's whitelist.

add-anveo-pin is used to add or update your Anveo Direct outbound calling PIN.

reset-conference-pins is a script that automatically and randomly resets the user and admin pins for access to the preconfigured conferencing application. Dial C-O-N-F from any registered SIP phone to connect to the conference.

reset-extension-passwords is a script that automatically and randomly resets ALL of the SIP passwords for extensions 701-705. Be careful using this one, or you may disable existing registered phones and cause Fail2Ban to blacklist the IP addresses of those users. HINT: You can place a call to the Ring Group associated with all five extensions by dialing 777.

reset-reminders-pin is a script that automatically and randomly resets the pin required to access the Telephone Reminders application by dialing 123. It's important to protect this application because a nefarious user could set up a reminder to call a number anywhere in the world assuming your SIP provider's account was configured to allow such calls.

show-feature-codes is a cheat sheet for all of the feature codes which can be dialed from any registered SIP phone. It documents how powerful a platform Incredible PBX 16 LITE actually is.

show-passwords is a script that displays ALL of the passwords associated with Incredible PBX 16 LITE. This includes SIP extension passwords, voicemail pins, conference pins, telephone reminders pin, and your Anveo Direct outbound calling pin (if configured). Note that voicemail pins are configured by the user of a SIP extension the first time the user accesses the voicemail system by dialing *97.

update-IncrediblePBX is the Automatic Update Utility which checks for server updates from incrediblepbx.com every time you log into your server as root using SSH or Putty. Do NOT disable it as it is used to load important fixes and security updates when necessary. We recommend logging into your server at least once a week.

pbxstatus (shown above) displays status of all major components of Incredible PBX 16 LITE.

Call Detail Records available in spreadsheet format at /var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/Master.csv.

Forwarding Calls to Your Cellphone. Keep in mind that inbound calls to your DIDs automatically ring all five SIP extensions, 701-705. The easiest way to also ring your cellphone is to set one of these five extensions to forward incoming calls to your cellphone. After logging into your PBX as root, issue the following command to forward calls from extension 705 to your cellphone: asterisk -rx "database put CF 705 6781234567"

To remove call forwarding: asterisk -rx "database del CF 705"

Originally published: Monday, July 8, 2019



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the VoIP-info Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.