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The Most Versatile VoIP Provider: FREE PORTING

The Rise and Fall of FreePIX: The 15-Year Journey of an Internet Sensation

NOTE: While on vacation, we dreamed up this fictional company depicting fictitious events to highlight some of the potential pitfalls which could arise when transfers of ownership lead to unanticipated future operational changes. Lawyers get paid to think about this stuff. Today, you get the hypotheticals at no charge. Give them some thought. WARNING: Do NOT visit the .com address associated with our fictional company. It takes NSFW to a whole new level. Similarities to existing companies are purely coincidental. We do not believe the facts depicted apply to any current owner of any company of which we are aware. But the scenario highlights what potentially could happen when a morphing project ultimately is sold to a company with vastly different objectives. We chose FreePIX for our company name because worldwide prior use by numerous entities would make ownership of the mark all but impossible.

Being huge fans of free photography, imagine our surprise upon first learning that the trademark for our new photography site was available. The next decade would see FreePIX.us grow into the largest public site for free storage of photos in the world. The beauty of FreePIX was two-fold. First, storage of an unlimited quantity of photos in any size and format was free. And the web-based GUI to view those photos was second to none. There were no restrictions on usage and no time limitations on free storage. It also provided a simple utility allowing developers to add new photography filters for site-wide use. In short, FreePIX was a photographer’s dream come true. Offload tens of thousands of photos into a high performance web site that’s available to friends and business clients at the click of a web browser button.

Going into our third year in "business" and reality is starting to sink in. People have lots of photos. What used to be one megapixel images have now quadrupled to four. Storage and bandwidth costs have escalated geometrically with the quadrupling of image sizes, but it’s worth it. We love photography. We’ve started to get inquiries from venture capitalists offering to help fund our site in exchange for a percentage interest in the company. No thanks!

We’re starting year five, and the average image now is 8 megapixels. What used to require a dedicated digital camera is now available on every smartphone. Our user base increased ten-fold in just the last year. And I desperately need some additional programming help to keep the web site ahead of the curve. Could also use some networking help to assist in managing the FreePIX storage platform. We’ve obviously got to figure some things out moving forward. Did we mention the storage and bandwidth costs have gone through the ceiling? One of the leading camera companies has made us an offer for the company. It’s not a lot of money, but we could still run the operation even though they would have the final say on future direction. They would simply insert a few ads on the web site to cover the costs. Some favorite commercial photographers of ours have also offered to lend a free hand with the programming and networking chores. Sounds like a good plan!

It’s year six, and our parent company just got sued for copyright infringement because a couple of jerks posted photos owned by some commercial photographers. The plaintiff’s lawyers want a lot of money for a silly mistake, but we obviously are going to need to tighten up and monitor the images that get posted. One of the image filtering apps on the site also looks strikingly similar to a commercial product with an existing patent on the specific filtering methodology. The parent company has brought in their legal team to make some changes.

It’s year seven now, and the parent company says it’s bleeding red ink on what they thought would be a charitable endeavor. And the legal hassles keep on coming. Sounds like FreePIX has been put on the auction block. Lucky for us, one of our commercial photographers has expressed an interest in buying everything, and he’s promised no major operational changes. He has some fresh ideas together with broad experience in the photography business so I think we’re in good shape moving forward. I can hardly believe how talented his programmers are. Looks like smooth sailing lies ahead.

It’s year nine now, and we’ve made further improvements. We now offer a library of commercial photos which can be licensed on the site. Doesn’t impact our free photo storage at all. The new owner now wants to restrict the site to non-commercial entities and to convert all of the photos to lower resolution to conserve disk space and reduce costs. I can’t much blame him. Can you believe commercial photography businesses store all of their work on our site? Doesn’t seem fair that we should foot the bill for their storage and bandwidth when they are competing with our commercial photography business.

We’ve also asked the programmers and lawyers to think of some ways to better insulate us from future copyright and trademark infringement lawsuits. They’ve come up with several ideas. First, we’d require indemnification of our legal expenses by anyone that uses our site. Second, we’d implement license keys for anyone posting images or apps on the site. This gives us a way to flag unauthorized material and warn visitors about the potential risk (as depicted above).1 Third, we’d impose a daily download limit of five images to further conserve our bandwidth. Finally, we’d ban other commercial entities from profiting off our site either with apps or commercial photography. These steps also provide a mechanism to quickly disable images and apps if we spot a problem with an individual poster or if an app competes with our own commercial products. Seems like a fair tradeoff for free photo storage. What’s not to like?

Fast forward to year 15 now. FreePIX has gone through a couple of additional owners. These owners have implemented pay-as-you-go image storage to cover bandwidth costs. Users were given 30 days of "free storage" to remove any photo collections. Only image applications sold by the site owner are now permitted on the site "for legal reasons." All images uploaded to and preserved on the site for more than 30 days become the exclusive, copyrighted property of the site owner.

The current owner has just received a $100 million purchase offer from a porn site that wants to monetize the 10 million registered users of the site. The potential buyer promises to preserve all photo content on the site for at least 30 days and will do nothing during that period to disable license keys or site access by current users. What could possibly go wrong?

Bar Exam Question: Would/should the results be any different with an open source, GPL platform where the owner retains exclusive control over issuance and termination of GPG keys needed to preserve the full functionality of the GPL software and access to the GPL repository with its keys?

Layman’s Translation: What if Dad gave me a shiny, new car but kept the keys?

Short-Term Fix for Incredible PBX GUI Users:

Originally published: Monday, July 27, 2015



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash 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.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. This image is perfectly safe. WARNING is used only to demonstrate how the FreePIX site might protect itself with unregistered images. []

Decisions, Decisions: Choosing the SOHO Asterisk Platform That’s Best For You

Each year we like to revisit the topic of choosing the best Asterisk® platform for deployment in the home and small business environment. No solution is obviously right for everybody. But we think it’s important to sketch out the relevant factors that need careful evaluation before you begin the installation process.

Our focus today is open source, GPL platforms with Asterisk for home or SOHO deployments. That excludes a broad swath of equally capable commercial or proprietary alternatives including ThirdLane, Switchvox, and FreePBX® Distro as well as many unified communications solutions that do not rely upon the Asterisk telephony engine including FreeSWITCH, ShoreTel, Cisco, 3CX, and many others. If your requirements exceed telephony support for more than a few dozen employees, our recommendation is to hire a consultant that can assist you in that decision-making process.

When It Comes to Hardware, Size Matters!

Even in the telephony world, it’s true. Size Matters! Choosing an Asterisk platform for your home and choosing a telephony platform for a call center are very different beasts. Our traditional recommendation for home and SOHO deployments was to go with dedicated hardware with an appropriately sized Atom processor, RAM, and hard drive. In the words of Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A Changin’." With the nosedive in Cloud processing costs and the emergence of powerful desktop virtual machine platforms, that may no longer be the smartest solution. First, it puts you in the hardware business which means you’ll have to deal with hardware failures and backups and redundancy. Second, depending upon where you live, it may not be cost-effective to maintain your own server. Electricity and Internet connectivity cost real money above and beyond hardware costs.

For home or SOHO deployments, it also depends upon what other computers already are in use around your house or office. For example, if you have a $2,000 iMac with a $100 backup drive running Carbon Copy Cloner each night, then you’ve already got a fully redundant server platform in place. You really don’t need a dedicated server for telephony to support a handful of telephones. VirtualBox® running any of the Incredible PBX™ solutions is free, and it’s fully capable of meeting your telephony requirements with no additional hardware investment.1 If your iMac’s main drive crashes, you can reboot from the attached USB backup drive with a single keystroke and never miss a beat. For those dead set on running dedicated hardware for your home or SOHO telephone system, there’s really no reason to spend more than $35 for a Raspberry Pi®. With its new quad-core processor and gig of RAM, it can meet or exceed any requirements you may have. Buy a second microSD card for redundancy and call it day as far as hardware is concerned.

If you’d prefer to separate your telephone system from your house or small office, a Cloud-based setup may be a better fit. Our Platinum sponsor, RentPBX,2 offers a worldwide collection of servers and will host your Asterisk-based PBX for $15 a month (Coupon Code: NOGOTCHAS) on a platform that rarely, if ever, goes down. If you like to tinker but also prefer a Cloud solution, consider Digital Ocean ($5 a month for a virtual machine) or Vultr ($2.50 a month) or HiFormance ($13/year). All four support Nerd Vittles with referral revenue which helps us keep the lights on.

NEWS FLASH: RentPBX now offers all of the new Incredible PBX builds with the Incredible PBX GUI. Tutorials available here: CentOS platform or Ubuntu platform. Use the NOGOTCHAS coupon code for $15/mo. pricing.

That’s our latest take on SOHO hardware. If you have additional questions or concerns, come join the PIAF Forum and take advantage of our hundreds of gurus who will give you all of the free advice you could ever want.

I’ve Got My Hardware Platform. Now What?

The next step is choosing an Asterisk telephony platform. That used to be easy. There was Plain Ol’ Asterisk if you were a guru or there was Asterisk@Home if you wanted a GUI to guide you through the telephony maze. Now it’s more complicated. There are a number of different Linux platforms. There are a number of different Asterisk versions. And there are a number of different GUIs that support Asterisk. So let’s work our way down the list starting with the Linux platform.

Choosing the Best Linux Platform for Asterisk

The gold standard for Asterisk servers has always been CentOS, a GPL clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux. It, too, is now owned by Red Hat. The old adage was that nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM. In the Asterisk community, that remains true with CentOS. Unfortunately, CentOS now comes in several flavors. There’s CentOS 6 or CentOS 7 which is a very different beast. For Asterisk deployments, you can’t go wrong with CentOS 6. It works well on the latest dedicated hardware and is supported on all virtual machine platforms.

As with choosing a language, you now have a choice of Linux platforms. There’s RedHat/CentOS, or Debian, or Ubuntu, or even Raspbian for the Raspberry Pi hardware. Unfortunately, the RedHat-CentOS and Debian-Ubuntu-Raspbian platforms have completely different languages, much like French and Spanish. The Linux packages that are included in the platforms also have different names. If you’re a Linux aficionado and you already have a favorite, stick with what you love. If you’re planning to deploy a Raspberry Pi, stick with Raspbian. For everyone else, CentOS 6 still is your best bet for now.

Choosing the Best Asterisk Platform

Believe it or not, there are many organizations still running their telephone systems using Asterisk 1.4 or 1.8 even though Digium support for those platforms ended years ago. In the commercial world, it is not uncommon to see telephone systems that are more than a decade old. With Asterisk, things are quite different. There’s a new version every year. Fortunately, Digium has adopted a new support philosophy and every other release (more or less) now is anointed with the LTS (Long Term Support) moniker. An LTS release gets four years of bug fixes and five years of security updates as opposed to the other releases that come with one year of bug fixes and two years of security updates. It’s still not 10 years, but it’s certainly better than wrestling with Asterisk updates annually.

We think there remains a need to reconsider these timetables. New updates have become so complex that the releases typically are almost two years into their life cycle before there is anyone that treats the releases as anything more than experimental. This was especially true of Asterisk 12 which was a terrific new product that provided dramatic improvements particularly in the SIP area. Unfortunately, it reached end-of-life status before most folks even had an opportunity to use it. Our recommendation remains Asterisk 13 which is an LTS version that’s rock-solid.

Choosing a GPL-Compliant GUI

Most of the GUIs for Asterisk have one primary purpose. They are code generators for the Asterisk telephony engine, nothing more. With each of them, you can turn off your web server after using the graphical user interface, and your phone system will continue to work as designed. The exception to that is Wazo which is an awesome real-time implementation of Asterisk. The only drawback is its steep learning curve.

In the top right sidebar of Nerd Vittles, you’ll find a colorful list of all the Asterisk distributions we support. The good news for you is they’re all free. So take a little time and load up several of them. Kick the tires until you find one that is easy for you to deploy. Our personal favorite remains Incredible PBX® 13-13, but you can’t go wrong with Issabel® or Wazo. Rome wasn’t built in a day so don’t expect to master Asterisk in a couple of hours. We’ve been at it for ten years and still learn something new almost every day. And that’s the fun of it.

A 3-Click Decision Tree for Asterisk

Now that you have the background, we also wanted to provide a simple Decision Tree tool that will guide you through choosing the Asterisk GPL aggregation that best meets your needs. After you’ve made your selections, the utility will point you to the tutorials that will walk you through downloading, installing, and using the platform of your choice. Just click here to get started. Enjoy!

Originally published: Monday, June 22, 2015  Updated: Wednesday, February 21, 2018



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash 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.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. We will introduce the all-new Incredible PBX GUI platform for VirtualBox next week on Nerd Vittles. If you’re in a hurry, the Pioneer’s Edition now is available with a tutorial to get you started on the PIAF Forum. []
  2. Some of our links refer users to service providers when we find their prices are competitive for the recommended products. Nerd Vittles receives a small referral fee from some of these providers to help cover the costs of our blog. We never recommend particular products solely to generate commissions. However, when pricing is comparable or availability is favorable, we support these providers because they support us. []

Introducing Incredible PBX 13 for CentOS 6 and 7


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If you’re looking for the latest and greatest pure GPL, open source Asterisk® 13 aggregation with a pure GPL, open source graphical user interface, then today’s another lucky day for you. Last week, we introduced the Ubuntu 14 edition of Incredible PBX™ for Asterisk 13, and this week we have the CentOS/Scientific Linux flavor to share. This is an independent aggregation based solely upon GPL code. Unlike the competition, the operating system and cloud repository to support the product also are pure GPL open source code. And the Incredible PBX installers themselves are pure GPL open source code. You are more than welcome (encouraged!) to examine, improve, and share your discoveries.

Incredible PBX for CentOS 6.9 and 7 follows our standard install procedure which means it’s up to you to first create a CentOS 6.7 or 7 platform. If you prefer Scientific Linux or Oracle Linux, feel free to start there. All work equally well as a base platform and are supported by a worldwide group of developers. Once your OS platform is in place, simply run the Incredible PBX installer. After 30-60 minutes of whirring, you’ll end up with an awesome (free) state-of-the-art Asterisk-based VoIP server with the very latest LTS version of Asterisk 13 as well as dozens of turnkey Incredible PBX applications. So enjoy a nice lunch while the Incredible PBX installer works its magic. No user intervention is required during the installation procedure. All text-to-speech (TTS) applications work out of the box. You can add Google’s Speech Recognition to many Incredible PBX applications by following our 5-minute tutorial. And a GPL installation script for free faxing with HylaFax and AvantFax is also included. Be sure to download the latest Incredible Fax installer!

Installing a Base CentOS Operating System

CAUTION: Installing Incredible PBX on the CentOS 7 platform is still a work in progress that is suitable for pioneers only. For production systems, stick with 6.9.

Let’s begin by installing 64-bit CentOS 6.9 or 7 on your favorite hardware or Desktop. Or you may prefer to use a Cloud provider1 that already offers a preconfigured CentOS image. In the latter case, you can skip this section.

For those using a dedicated hardware platform or wishing to install CentOS as a virtual machine, the drill is the same. Start by downloading the 64-bit CentOS 6.9 minimal ISO or the CentOS 7 minimal ISO or . Burn the ISO to a DVD unless you’ll be booting from the ISO on a virtual machine platform such as VirtualBox. On virtual platforms, we recommend at least 1GB RAM and a 20GB dedicated drive. For VirtualBox, here are the settings:

Type: Linux
Version: RedHat 64-bit
RAM: 1024MB
Default Drive Options with 20GB+ space
Create
Settings->System: Enable IO APIC and Disable HW Clock (leave rest alone)
Settings->Audio: Enable
Settings->Network: Enable, Bridged
Settings->Storage: Far right CD icon (choose your ISO)
Start

Boot your server with the ISO, and start the CentOS install. Here are the simplest installation steps:

Choose Language and Click Continue
Click: Install Destination (do not change anything!)
Click: Done
Click: Network & Hostname
Click: ON
Click: Done
Click: Begin Installation
Click: Root Password: password, password, Click Done twice
Wait for Minimal Software Install and Setup to finish
Click: Reboot

Configuring CentOS for Incredible PBX

Now log into your server as root and issue the following commands to put the basic pieces in place and to reconfigure your Ethernet port as eth0. Make a note of your IP address so you can log in with SSH.

setenforce 0
yum -y install net-tools nano wget tar
yum -y upgrade --skip-broken
# decipher your server's IP address
ifconfig
# patch grub and ignore errors if your server doesn't use it
sed -i 's|quiet|quiet net.ifnames=0 biosdevdame=0|' /etc/default/grub
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
# for older CentOS/SL 6 platforms, perform 3 steps below:
#wget http://incrediblepbx.com/update-kernel-devel
#chmod +x update-kernel-devel
#./update-kernel-devel
reboot

If you’re on a virtual machine platform, now would be a good time to make an export or backup of your CentOS image. The minimal install is about 500MB. Don’t forget to first remove your hardware address (HWADDR) and network UUID from /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-enp0s3 or whatever file name was assigned to your hardware. The saved image will be bootable with DHCP network support anywhere down the road.

NEWS FLASH: For those wanting to test things out using VirtualBox, a Scientific Linux 7.1 Remix image (2GB) is now available on SourceForge. It gets you to right here in the install process.

Installing Incredible PBX with CentOS

Adding Incredible PBX to a running CentOS 6.9 or 7 server is a walk in the park. To restate the obvious, your server needs a reliable Internet connection to proceed. Be sure to use SSH (or Putty on a Windows machine) to begin because the installer locks the firewall down to your local network and the IP address of the machine from which you perform the install. Log into your new server as root at the IP address you deciphered in the ifconfig step in the CentOS installation procedure above.

WARNING: If you’re using a 512MB droplet at Digital Ocean, be advised that their setups do NOT include a swap file. This may cause serious problems when you run out of RAM. Uncomment ./create-swapfile-DO line below to create a 1GB swap file which will be activated whenever you exceed 90% RAM usage on Digital Ocean.

Now let’s begin the Incredible PBX install.

NOTE: To more clearly identify packaging as we move forward, there has been a change in the Incredible PBX naming and numbering scheme. Henceforth, the file name and version reflects the Asterisk version, the GUI version, the Incredible PBX release number, and the OS platform. For example, incrediblepbx13-12.0-centos tells you the product includes Asterisk 13, the version 12 GUI, .0 release number, and the CentOS platform.

cd /root
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx13-12.2-centos.tar.gz
tar zxvf incrediblepbx*
#./create-swapfile-DO
./IncrediblePBX*

Once you have agreed to the license agreement and terms of use, press Enter and go have a long cup of coffee. The Incredible PBX installer runs unattended so find something to do for the next 30-60 minutes unless you just like watching code compile. When the installation is complete, reboot your server and log back in as root. You should be greeted by something like this showing the status of the major apps as well as your free RAM and DISK space:

Perform the following steps:

Make your root password very secure: passwd
Create admin password for GUI access: /root/admin-pw-change
Set your correct time zone: /root/timezone-setup
Create admin password for web apps: htpasswd /etc/pbx/wwwpasswd admin
Make a copy of your Knock codes: cat /root/knock.FAQ
Decipher IP address and other info about your server: status

Incredible PBX includes an automatic update utility which downloads important updates whenever you log into your server as root. We recommend you log in once a week to keep your server current.

You can access the Incredible PBX GUI using your favorite web browser to configure your server. Just enter the IP address shown in the status display.

Choose Incredible GUI Administration from the Admin menu of the Kennonsoft GUI (shown above) by clicking on User to switch. The default username is admin and the password is what you set when the install completed. Now edit extension 701 so you can figure out (or change) the randomized passwords that were set up for your 701 extension and voicemail account: Applications -> Extensions -> 701. If you’re behind a hardware-based firewall, verify the NAT setting: YES.

Soft Phone Setup with Incredible PBX

Now you’re ready to set up a telephone so that you can play with Incredible PBX. 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’ll need the IP address of your server plus your extension
701 password. Choose Settings -> Accounts and click the New button. Fill in the blanks using the IP address of your server, 701 for your account name, and whatever password you created for the extension. Click OK.

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 - Allison's IVR Demo
947 - Weather by ZIP Code
951 - Yahoo News
*61 - Time of Day
*68 - Wakeup Call
TODAY - Today in History

Now you’re ready to connect to the telephones in the rest of the world. If you live in the U.S., the easiest way (at least for now) is to set up a free Google Voice account. Google has threatened to shut this down but as this is written, it still works. We will have an update for OAUTH authentication support soon. The safer long-term solution is to choose several SIP providers and set up redundant trunks for your incoming and outbound calls. The PIAF Forum includes dozens of recommendations to get you started.

Google Voice: Plain-Text Passwords

If you want to use Google Voice, you’ll need a dedicated Google Voice account to support Incredible PBX. If you want to use the inbound fax capabilities of Incredible Fax, then you’ll need an additional Google Voice line that can be routed to the FAX custom destination using the GUI. The more obscure the username (with some embedded numbers), the better off you will be. This will keep folks from bombarding you with unsolicited Gtalk chat messages, and who knows what nefarious scheme will be discovered using Google messaging six months from now. So keep this account a secret!

We’ve tested this extensively using an existing Gmail account, and inbound calling is just not reliable. The reason seems to be that Google always chooses Gmail chat as the inbound call destination if there are multiple registrations from the same IP address. So, be reasonable. Do it our way! Set up a dedicated Gmail and Google Voice account, and use it exclusively with Incredible PBX. It’s free at least through 2013. Google Voice no longer is by invitation only so, if you’re in the U.S. or have a friend that is, head over to the Google Voice site and register.

You must choose a telephone number (aka DID) for your new account, or Google Voice calling will not work… in either direction. Google used to permit outbound Gtalk calls using a fake CallerID, but that obviously led to abuse so it’s over! You also have to tie your Google Voice account to at least one working phone number as part of the initial setup process. Your cellphone number will work just fine. Don’t skip this step either. Just enter the provided 2-digit confirmation code when you tell Google to place the test call to the phone number you entered. Once the number is registered, you can disable it if you’d like in Settings, Voice Setting, Phones. But…

IMPORTANT: Be sure to enable the Google Chat option as one of your phone destinations in Settings, Voice Setting, Phones. That’s the destination we need for The Incredible PBX to work its magic! Otherwise, all inbound and outbound calls will fail. If you don’t see this option, you may need to call up Gmail and enable Google Chat there first. Then go back to the Google Voice Settings.

While you’re still in Google Voice Settings, click on the Calls tab. Make sure your settings match these:

  • Call ScreeningOFF
  • Call PresentationOFF
  • Caller ID (In)Display Caller’s Number
  • Caller ID (Out)Don’t Change Anything
  • Do Not DisturbOFF
  • Call Options (Enable Recording)OFF
  • Global Spam FilteringON

Click Save Changes once you adjust your settings. Under the Voicemail tab, plug in your email address so you get notified of new voicemails. Down the road, receipt of a Google Voice voicemail will be a big hint that something has come unglued on your PBX.

UPDATE: Google has improved things… again. You may not see the options documented above at all. Instead, you may be presented with the new Google Voice interface which does not include the Google Chat option. But fear not. At least for now there’s still a way to get there. After you have set up your new phone number, click on (1) Settings -> Phone Numbers and then click (2) Transfer (as shown below). That returned the old UI. Make sure the Google Chat option is selected and disable forwarding calls to default phone number.



One final word of caution is in order regardless of your choice of providers: Do NOT use special characters in any provider passwords, or nothing will work!

Now you’re ready to set up your Google Voice trunk in the GUI. After logging in with your browser, click the Connectivity tab and choose Google Voice/Motif. To Add a new Google Voice account, just fill out the form. Do NOT check the third box or incoming calls will never ring!

IMPORTANT LAST STEP: Google Voice will not work unless you restart Asterisk from the Linux command line at this juncture. Using SSH, log into your server as root and issue the following command: amportal restart.

If you have trouble getting Google Voice to work (especially if you have previously used your Google Voice account from a different IP address), try this Google Voice Reset Procedure. It usually fixes connectivity problems. If it still doesn’t work, enable Less Secure Apps using this Google tool.

Google Voice: Using OAuth Credentials

If you’re one of the five people on Earth that does not yet have a Gmail account, start there. Once you’ve set up your Gmail account and logged in, open a new browser tab to access the Google Voice site. Accept the Google Terms and Privacy Policy. Then choose a new Phone Number in your favorite area code. NOTE: Before Google will assign you a number, you must enter an existing U.S. phone number to verify your identity and location as well as to use for initially forwarding calls. Once your account is set up, you will get an email asking that you verify your email address. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be prompted to login to your Google Voice account again. When you do so, you’ll be prompted to Install the Hangouts Dialer app to make VoIP calls from Android. Do NOT install the dialer, or you may break the ability to use your Google Voice number with Asterisk. Instead, click X to close the dialog box.

UPDATE: Google continues to tighten up on obtaining more than one Google Voice number from the same computer or the same IP address. If this is a problem for you, here’s a workaround. From your smartphone, install the Google Voice app from iPhone App Store or Google’s Play Store. Then open the app and login to your new Google account. Choose your new Google Voice number when prompted and provide a cell number with SMS as your callback number for verification. Once the number is verified, log out of Google Voice. Do NOT make any calls. Now head back to your PC’s browser and login to http://google.com/voice. You will be presented with the new Google Voice interface which does not include the Google Chat option. But fear not. At least for now there’s still a way to get there. After you have set up your new phone number and opened the Google Voice interface, click on the 3 vertical dots in the left sidebar (it’s labeled More). When it opens, click Legacy Google Voice in the sidebar. That will return you to the old UI. Now click on the Gear icon (upper right) and choose Settings. Make sure the Google Chat option is selected and disable forwarding calls to whatever default phone number you set up.

Next, click on the Calls tab. Make sure your settings match these:

  • Call ScreeningOFF
  • Call PresentationOFF
  • Caller ID (In)Display Caller’s Number
  • Caller ID (Out)Don’t Change Anything
  • Do Not DisturbOFF
  • Call Options (Enable Recording)OFF
  • Global Spam FilteringON

Under the Voicemail tab, plug in your email address so you get notified of new voicemails. Then click Save Settings. Down the road, receipt of a Google Voice voicemail will be a big hint that something has come unglued on your PBX.

One final word of caution is in order regardless of your choice of providers: Do NOT use special characters in any provider passwords, or nothing will work!

Now it’s time to obtain your OAuth 2 credentials. Even though it’s a bit more work on the front end, the good news is you won’t have to worry about your Google Voice trunks failing when Google phases out plain-text passwords. The other good news is you won’t be passing your plain-text Google Voice credentials across the Internet for everyone in the world to see.

While you’re still logged into your Google Voice account, you need to obtain a refresh_token which is what you’ll use instead of a password when setting up your Google Voice account with XiVO. Here’s how.

1. Be sure you are still logged into your Google Voice account. If not, log back in at https://www.google.com/voice.

2. Go to the Google OAUTH Playground using your browser while still logged into your Google Voice account.

3. Once logged in to Google OAUTH Playground, click on the Gear icon in upper right corner (as shown below).

  3a. Check the box: Use your own OAuth credentials
  3b. Enter Incredible PBX OAuth Client ID:

466295438629-prpknsovs0b8gjfcrs0sn04s9hgn8j3d.apps.googleusercontent.com

  3c. Enter Incredible PBX OAuth Client secret: 4ewzJaCx275clcT4i4Hfxqo2
  3d. Click Close

4. Click Step 1: Select and Authorize APIs (as shown below)

  4a. In OAUTH Scope field, enter: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/googletalk
  4b. Click Authorize APIs (blue) button.

5. Click Step 2: Exchange authorization code for tokens

  5a. Click Exchange authorization code for tokens (blue) button

  5b. When the tokens have been generated, Step 2 will close.

6. Reopen Step 2 and copy your Refresh_Token. This is the "password" you will need to enter (together with your Gmail account name and 10-digit GV phone number) when you add your GV trunk in the Incredible PBX GUI. Store this refresh_token in a safe place. Google doesn’t permanently store it!

7. Authorization tokens NEVER expire! If you ever need to remove your authorization tokens, go here and delete Incredible PBX Google Voice OAUTH entry by clicking on it and choosing DELETE option.

Switch back to your Gmail account and click on the Phone icon at the bottom of the window to place one test call. Once you successfully place a call, you can log out of Google Voice and Gmail.

Now you’re ready to set up your Google Voice trunk in the GUI. After logging in with your browser, click the Connectivity tab and choose Google Voice/Motif. To Add a new Google Voice account, just fill out the form. Do NOT check the third box or incoming calls will never ring!

Troubleshooting Audio and DTMF Problems

You can avoid one-way audio on calls and touchtones that don’t work with these simple settings in the GUI: Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. Just plug in your public IP address and your private IP subnet. Then set ULAW as the only Audio Codec.

Incredible PBX Security Model for CentOS

Incredible PBX for CentOS joins our previous Ubuntu build as our most secure turnkey PBX implementation. As configured, it is protected by both Fail2Ban and a hardened configuration of the IPtables Linux firewall. The latest release also includes Port Knocker for simple, secure access from any remote computer or smartphone. You can get up to speed on how the technology works by reading the Nerd Vittles tutorial. Your Port Knocker credentials are stored in /root/knock.FAQ together with activation instructions for your server and mobile devices. The NeoRouter VPN client also is included for rock-solid, secure connectivity to remote users. Read our previous tutorial for setup instructions. As configured, nobody can access your PBX without your credentials AND an IP address that is either on your private network or that matches the IP address of your server or the PC from which you installed Incredible PBX. You can whitelist additional IP addresses by running the command-line utility /root/add-ip. You can remove whitelisted IP addresses by running /root/del-acct. Incredible PBX is preconfigured to let you connect to many of the leading SIP hosting providers without additional firewall tweaking. We always recommend you also add an extra layer of protection by running your server behind a hardware-based firewall with no Internet port exposure, but that’s your call. And it’s your phone bill. 😉

The IPtables firewall is a complex piece of software. If you need assistance with configuring it, visit the PIAF Forum for some friendly assistance.

Incredible Backup and Restore

We’re pleased to introduce our latest backup and restore utilities for Incredible PBX. Running /root/incrediblebackup will create a backup image of your server in /tmp. This backup image then can be copied to any other medium desired for storage. To restore it to another Incredible PBX server, simply copy the image to a server running Asterisk 13 and the same version of the Incredible PBX GUI. Then run /root/incrediblerestore. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Incredible PBX Automatic Update Utility

Every time you log into your server as root, Incredible PBX will ping the IncrediblePBX.com web site to determine whether one or more updates are available to bring your server up to current specs. We recommend you log in at least once a week just in case some new security vulnerability should come along.

In the meantime, we encourage you to sign up for an account on the PIAF Forum and join the discussion. In addition to providing first-class, free support, we think you’ll enjoy the camaraderie.

Originally published: Monday, July 13, 2015


Support Issues. With any application as sophisticated as this one, you’re bound to have questions. Blog comments are a terrible place to handle support issues although we welcome general comments about our articles and software. If you have particular support issues, we encourage you to get actively involved in the PBX in a Flash Forums. It’s the best Asterisk tech support site in the business, and it’s all free! Please have a look and post your support questions there. Unlike some forums, ours is extremely friendly and is supported by literally hundreds of Asterisk gurus and thousands of users just like you. You won’t have to wait long for an answer to your question.





Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash 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.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

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

Introducing Incredible PBX 13-12 with Incredible GUI for the Ubuntu 14 Platform


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Two months ago we turned the page on Asterisk® GUIs by introducing a new GUI that hopefully provides the best of both worlds. It preserves the GPL components of the FreePBX® product that many of us have nurtured for almost a decade while removing the commercial pieces that have introduced some friction into the equation for users and companies that simply wished to deploy or redistribute a graphical user interface for Asterisk in accordance with the free GPL licenses under which the product and its components were licensed. We followed up by opening up the cloud component which serves as the lynchpin for GPL module administration within the GUI itself. We remain hopeful that these two tweaks will encourage Sangoma, the new owner of the FreePBX project, to do the right thing and get the non-commercial pieces of the project back on the right track moving forward. As we’ve stressed all along, we do not want to tarnish the incredibly hard work that dozens of developers in the open source community have poured into both of these projects over the past decade. We continue to be amazed at what they’ve been able to achieve, and we salute their accomplishments. The Asterisk 12 and 13 revolution never would have happened without the contributions of the FreePBX development team. We think the new Incredible PBX GUI stands as a testament to what can be accomplished while preserving the true spirit of open source development and the terms of the GPL licenses under which this product and its numerous modules are licensed.

Today we take the next step in the journey with release of a production-ready version of Asterisk 13 LTS for the Ubuntu 14 platform. It has all the bells and whistles to which you have become accustomed including Incredible Fax featuring HylaFax and AvantFax. It also includes literally dozens of turnkey applications that show off the very best features of Asterisk. In addition to Incredible PBX, you also gain unfettered access to our new GPL repository to maintain release 12 of the GUI. No strings, no gotchas, and no murky licenses. Pure GPL in Plain View!

Why Not Use FreePBX 13? Glad you asked. Despite the freepbx.org facelift1 and the eternal message that "The ‘Free’ Stands for Freedom," it turns out the business practices haven’t changed much since the Sangoma takeover. If your idea of "freedom" is a closed source VoIP platform with no way to emulate the repository used to manage and upgrade the "GPL" components in FreePBX 13 and no way to install the FreePBX 13 GUI or its "GPL" components other than switching to the proprietary FreePBX Distro, then FreePBX 13 may be just the ticket. If you’d prefer a RealGPL platform that lets you choose which components you’d like on your server, then keep reading. And drop the Sangoma and Digium honchos a note and let them know how you feel about FREEDOM.

William J. Wignall, President and CEO
Sangoma Technologies
100 Renfrew Drive, Suite 100
Markham ON L3R 9R6 CANADA

Danny Windham, CEO
Digium, Inc.
445 Jan Davis Drive Northwest
Huntsville, AL 35806 USA

Mark Spencer, Founder and CTO
Digium, Inc.
445 Jan Davis Drive Northwest
Huntsville, AL 35806 USA

Update: A GPL release of FreePBX 13 beta miraculously appeared shortly after publication of this article. Still no GPL repository is available that is compatible with the integrated Admin Module component of the product.

Building an Ubuntu 14.04 Platform for Incredible PBX

As a result of the trademark and copyright morass, we’ve steered away from the bundled operating system in favor of a methodology that relies upon you to put in place the operating system platform on which to run PBX in a Flash or Incredible PBX. The good news is it’s easy! With many cloud-based providers2, you can simply click a button to choose your favorite OS flavor and within minutes, you’re ready to go. With many virtual machine platforms such as VirtualBox, it’s equally simple to find a pre-built Ubuntu 14.04 image or roll your own.

If you’re new to VoIP or to Nerd Vittles, here’s our best piece of advice. Don’t take our word for anything! Try it for yourself in the Cloud! You can build an Ubuntu 14.04 image on Digital Ocean in under one minute and install today’s Incredible PBX for Ubuntu 14.04 in about 15 minutes. Then try it out for two full months. It won’t cost you a dime. Use our referral link to sign up for an account. Enter a valid credit card to verify you’re who you say you are. Create an Ubuntu 14.04 (not 14.10!) 512MB droplet of the cheapest flavor ($5/mo.). Go to the Billing section of the site, and enter the following promo code: UBUNTUDROPLET. That’s all there is to it. A $10 credit will be added to your account, and you can play to your heart’s content. Delete droplets, add droplets, and enjoy the free ride!

For today, we’ll walk you through building your own stand-alone server using the Ubuntu 14.04 mini.iso. If you’re using Digital Ocean in the Cloud, skip down to Installing Incredible PBX 13-12 (HINT: 13 tells you the Asterisk release and 12 tells you the GUI release). If you’re using your own hardware, to get started, download the 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr" Minimal ISO from here. Yes, the 32-bit platform is also supported. Now burn the ISO to a CD/DVD or thumb drive and boot your dedicated server from the image. Remember, you’ll be reformatting the drive in your server so pick a machine you don’t need for other purposes.

For those that would prefer to build your Ubuntu 14.04 Wonder Machine using VirtualBox on any Windows, Mac, or existing Linux Desktop, here are the simple steps. Create a new virtual machine specifying the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. Allocate 1024MB of RAM (512MB also works fine with a swap file) and at least 20GB of disk space using the default hard drive setup in all three steps. In Settings, click System and check Enable I/O APIC and uncheck Hardware Clock in UTC Time. Click Audio and Specify then Enable your sound card. Click Network and Enable Network Adapter for Adapter 1 and choose Bridged Adapter. Finally, in Storage, add the Ubuntu 14.04 mini.iso to your VirtualBox Storage Tree as shown below. Then click OK and start up your new virtual machine. Simple!

Here are the steps to get Ubuntu 14.04 humming on your new server or virtual machine once you’ve booted up. If you can bake cookies from a recipe, you can do this:

UBUNTU mini.iso install:
Choose language
Choose timezone
Detect keyboard
Hostname: incrediblepbx < continue >
Choose mirror for downloads
Confirm archive mirror
Leave proxy blank unless you need it
< continue >
** couple minutes of whirring as initial components are loaded **
New user name: incredible
< continue >
Account username: incredible
< continue >
Account password: makeitsecure
< continue >
Encrypt home directory < no >
Confirm time zone < yes >
Partition disks: Guided - use entire disk and set up LVM
Confirm disk to partition
Write changes to disks and configure LVM
Whole volume? < continue>
Write changes to disks < yes> < -- last chance to preserve your disk drive!
** about 15 minutes of whirring during base system install ** < no touchy anything>
** another 5 minutes of whirring during base software install ** < no touchy anything>
Upgrades? Install security updates automatically
** another 5 minutes of whirring during more software installs ** < no touchy anything>
Software selection: *Basic Ubuntu server (only!)
** another couple minutes of whirring during software installs ** < no touchy anything>
Grub boot loader: < yes>
UTC for system clock: < no>
Installation complete: < continue> after removing installation media
** on VirtualBox, PowerOff after reboot and remove [-] mini.iso from Storage Tree & restart VM
login as user: incredible
** enter user incredible's password **
sudo passwd
** enter incredible password again and then create secure root user password **
su root
** enter root password **
apt-get update
apt-get install ssh -y
sed -i 's|without-password|yes|' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -i 's|yes"|without-password"|' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -i 's|"quiet"|"quiet text"|' /etc/default/grub
update-grub
ifconfig
** write down the IP address of your server from ifconfig results
reboot
** login via SSH to continue **

Installing Incredible PBX 13-12 on Your Ubuntu 14.04 Server

Adding Incredible PBX 13-12 to a running Ubuntu 14.04 server is a walk in the park. To restate the obvious, your server needs a reliable Internet connection to proceed. Using SSH (or Putty on a Windows machine), log into your new server as root at the IP address you deciphered in the ifconfig step at the end of the Ubuntu install procedure above. First, make sure to run the update step for Ubuntu below before you begin the install. This is especially important if you’re using a cloud-based Ubuntu 14 server.

ALERT: Ubuntu has introduced a new MySQL bug in their June, 2016 upgrade. Do NOT run apt-get upgrade, or Incredible PBX installation will fail.

apt-get update && touch /root/COPYING

WARNING: If you’re using a 512MB droplet at Digital Ocean, be advised that the DO Ubuntu setup does NOT include a swap file. This may cause serious problems when you run out of RAM. Uncomment ./create-swapfile-DO line below to create a 1GB swap file which will be activated whenever you exceed 90% RAM usage on Digital Ocean.

Now let’s begin the Incredible PBX 13-12 install. Log back in as root and issue the following commands:

cd /root
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx13-12.2-ubuntu14.tar.gz
tar zxvf incrediblepbx*
apt-get install dialog
#./create-swapfile-DO
./Incredible*

Once you have agreed to the license agreement and terms of use, press Enter and go have a 30-minute cup of coffee. The Incredible PBX installer runs unattended so find something to do for a bit unless you just like watching code compile. When you see "Have a nice day", your installation is complete. Hit the Enter key to reboot the server unless you need to add additional entries to your firewall whitelist.

Once the server restarts, log back in as root and you should be greeted with a status display that looks something like this after the Automatic Update Utility runs:

Assuming you’ve already created a very secure root password (update it by running passwd), perform the following 5 Steps to get everything locked down:

  1. Create an admin password for GUI access: /root/admin-pw-change
  2. Create an admin password for Apache web access: htpasswd /etc/pbx/wwwpasswd admin
  3. Configure the correct timezone for your server: /root/timezone-setup
  4. Retrieve your PortKnocker setup like this: cat /root/knock.FAQ
  5. Add IPtables WhiteList entries for remote access: /root/add-ip or /root/add-fqdn

Incredible PBX includes an automatic update utility which downloads important updates whenever you log into your server as root. We recommend you log in once a week to keep your server current. Now would be a good time to log out and back into your server at the Linux command line to bring your server up to current specs.

You can access the Incredible PBX GUI using your favorite web browser to configure your server. Just enter the IP address shown in the status display.

When the Kennonsoft menu (shown above) appears, click on the User tab to open the Admin menu. Then click on Incredible GUI Administration to access the Incredible PBX GUI. The default username is admin with the password you created above. Now edit extension 701 so you can figure out (or change) the randomized passwords that were set up for default 701 extension and voicemail: Applications -> Extensions -> 701.

Setting Up a Soft Phone to Use with Incredible PBX

Now you’re ready to set up a telephone so that you can play with Incredible PBX. 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’ll need the IP address of your server plus your extension 701 password. Choose Settings -> Accounts and click the New button. Fill in the blanks using the IP address of your server, 701 for your account name, and whatever password you created for the extension. Click OK.

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. You can dial a few of these to get started or, better yet, take Allison’s Incredible PBX IVR for a spin by dialing D-E-M-O (3366). NOTE: The Voice Recognition options will not work until you first enter your credentials (covered below).

123 - Reminders
222 - ODBC Demo (use acct: 12345)
947 - Weather by ZIP Code
951 - Yahoo News
*61 - Time of Day
*68 - Wakeup Call
TODAY - Today in History

The next step is establishing an interface on your PBX to connect to the telephones in the rest of the world. If you live in the U.S., the easiest way (at least for now) is to use an existing (free) Google Voice account. Google has threatened to shut this down but as this is written, it still works with previously set up Google Voice accounts. The more desirable long-term solution is to choose several SIP providers and set up redundant trunks for your incoming and outbound calls. The PIAF Forum includes dozens of recommendations to get you started.

Incredible PBX Wholesale Providers Access

Nerd Vittles has negotiated a special offer that gives you instant access to 300+ wholesale carriers around the globe. In lieu of paying the $650 annual fee for the service, a 13% wholesale surcharge is assessed to cover operational costs of TelecomsXchange. In addition, TelecomsXchange has generously offered to contribute a portion of the surcharge to support the Incredible PBX open source project. See this Nerd Vittles tutorial for installation instructions and signup details.

Configuring Google Voice

If you want to use Google Voice, you’ll need a dedicated Google Voice account to support Incredible PBX. If you want to use the inbound fax capabilities of Incredible Fax 11, then you’ll need an additional Google Voice line that can be routed to the FAX custom destination using the GUI. The more obscure the username (with some embedded numbers), the better off you will be. This will keep folks from bombarding you with unsolicited Gtalk chat messages, and who knows what nefarious scheme will be discovered using Google messaging six months from now. So keep this account a secret!

We’ve tested this extensively using an existing Google Voice account, and inbound calling is just not reliable. The reason seems to be that Google always chooses Gmail chat as the inbound call destination if there are multiple registrations from the same IP address. So, be reasonable. Do it our way! Use a previously configured and dedicated Gmail and Google Voice account, and use it exclusively with Incredible PBX 11.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to enable the Google Chat option as one of your phone destinations in Settings, Voice Setting, Phones. That’s the destination we need for The Incredible PBX to work its magic! Otherwise, all inbound and outbound calls will fail. If you don’t see this option, you’re probably out of luck. Google has disabled the option in newly created accounts as well as some old ones that had Google Chat disabled. Now go back to the Google Voice Settings.

While you’re still in Google Voice Settings, click on the Calls tab. Make sure your settings match these:

  • Call ScreeningOFF
  • Call PresentationOFF
  • Caller ID (In)Display Caller’s Number
  • Caller ID (Out)Don’t Change Anything
  • Do Not DisturbOFF
  • Call Options (Enable Recording)OFF
  • Global Spam FilteringON

Click Save Changes once you adjust your settings. Under the Voicemail tab, plug in your email address so you get notified of new voicemails. Down the road, receipt of a Google Voice voicemail will be a big hint that something has come unglued on your PBX.

UPDATE: Google has improved things… again. You may not see the options documented above at all. Instead, you may be presented with the new Google Voice interface which does not include the Google Chat option. But fear not. At least for now there’s still a way to get there. After you have set up your new phone number, click on (1) Settings -> Phone Numbers and then click (2) Transfer (as shown below). That returned the old UI. Make sure the Google Chat option is selected and disable forwarding calls to default phone number.



One final word of caution is in order regardless of your choice of providers: Do NOT use special characters in any provider passwords, or nothing will work!

Now you’re ready to set up your Google Voice trunk in the GUI. After logging in with your browser, click the Connectivity tab and choose Google Voice/Motif. To Add a new Google Voice account, just fill out the form. Do NOT check the third box or incoming calls will never ring!

IMPORTANT LAST STEP: Google Voice will not work unless you restart Asterisk from the Linux command line at this juncture. Using SSH, log into your server as root and issue the following command: amportal restart.

If you have trouble getting Google Voice to work (especially if you have previously used your Google Voice account from a different IP address), try this Google Voice Reset Procedure. It usually fixes connectivity problems. If it still doesn’t work, enable Less Secure Apps using this Google tool.

And here’s another way to access Google Voice securely using an inexpensive commercial SIP gateway:

Troubleshooting Audio and DTMF Problems

You can avoid one-way audio on calls and touchtones that don’t work by entering these simple settings in the GUI: Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. Just plug in your public IP address and your private IP subnet. Then set ULAW as the only Audio Codec.

Adding Voice Recognition to Incredible PBX

To support many of our applications, Incredible PBX has included Google’s speech recognition service for years. These applications include Weather Reports by City (949), AsteriDex Voice Dialing by Name (411), and Wolfram Alpha for Asterisk (4747), all of which use Lefteris Zafiris’ terrific speech-recog AGI script. Unfortunately (for some), Google now has tightened up the terms of use for their free speech recognition service. Now you can only use it for "personal and development use." If you meet those criteria, keep reading. Here’s how to activate speech recognition on Incredible PBX. Don’t skip any steps!

Now you’re ready to try out the speech recognition apps. Dial 949 and say the name of a city and state/province/country to get a current weather forecast from Yahoo. Dial 411 and say "American Airlines" to be connected to American.

To use Wolfram Alpha by phone, you first must install it. Obtain your free Wolfram Alpha APP-ID here. Then run the one-click installer: /root/wolfram/wolframalpha-oneclick.sh. Insert your APP-ID when prompted. Now dial 4747 to access Wolfram Alpha by phone and enter your query, e.g. "What planes are overhead." Read the Nerd Vittles tutorial for additional examples and tips.

A Few Words about the Incredible PBX Security Model for Ubuntu

Incredible PBX for Ubuntu 14 is a very secure, turnkey PBX implementation. As configured, your server is protected by both Fail2Ban and a hardened configuration of the IPtables Linux firewall. Nobody can access your PBX without your credentials AND an IP address that is either on your private network or that matches the IP address of your server or the PC from which you installed Incredible PBX. Incredible PBX is preconfigured to let you connect to many of the leading SIP hosting providers without additional firewall tweaking.

You can whitelist additional IP addresses for remote access in several ways. First, you can use the command-line utilities: /root/add-ip and /root/add-fqdn. You can also remove whitelisted IP addresses by running /root/del-acct. Second, you can dial into extension 864 (or use a DID pointed to extension 864 aka TM4) and enter an IP address to whitelist. Before Travelin’ Man 4 will work, you’ll need to add credentials for each caller using the tools in /root/tm4. You must add at least one account before dial-in whitelisting will be enabled. Third, you can temporarily whitelist an IP address by successfully executing the PortKnocker 3-knock code established for your server. You’ll find the details and the codes in /root/knock.FAQ. Be advised that IP addresses whitelisted with PortKnocker (only!) go away whenever your server is rebooted or the IPtables firewall is restarted. For further information on the PortKnocker technology and available clients for iOS and Android devices, review the Nerd Vittles tutorial.

HINT: The reason that storing your PortKnocker codes in a safe place is essential is because it may be your only available way to gain access to your server if your IP address changes. You obviously can’t use the command-line tools to whitelist a new IP address if you cannot gain access to your server at the new IP address.

We always recommend you also add an extra layer of protection by running your server behind a hardware-based firewall with no Internet port exposure, but that’s your call. If you use a hardware-based firewall, be sure to map the three PortKnocker ports to the internal IP address of your server!

The NeoRouter VPN client also is included for rock-solid, secure connectivity for remote users. Read our previous tutorial for setup instructions.

As one would expect, the IPtables firewall is a complex piece of software. If you need assistance configuring it, visit the PIAF Forum for some friendly assistance.

Adding Incredible Fax 11 to Your Server

Once you’ve completed the Incredible PBX install, log out and log back in to load the latest automatic updates. Then reboot. Now you’re ready to continue your adventure by installing Incredible Fax 11 for Ubuntu. Special thanks to Josh North for all his hard work on this! The latest download includes the Incredible Fax 11 installer, but it needs updating. Follow this tutorial to load the appropriate update onto your server. Then just run the script:

cd /root
./incrediblefax11_ubuntu14.sh

Accept all of the defaults during the installation process. IMPORTANT: Once you complete the install, reboot your server. After rebooting, log into the GUI and choose Module Admin and enable the AvantFax module. When you log out of the GUI, there now will be an option for AvantFax on the GUI’s main login screen. Choose it and enter admin:password to login and change your default password. You also can set your AvantFax admin password by logging into the Linux CLI and… /root/avantfax-pw-change.

Incredible Backup and Restore

We’re pleased to introduce our latest backup and restore utilities for Incredible PBX. Running /root/incrediblebackup will create a backup image of your server in /tmp. This backup image then can be copied to any other medium desired for storage. To restore it to another Incredible PBX server, simply copy the image to a server running Asterisk 13 and the Incredible PBX 13-12 GUI. Then run /root/incrediblerestore. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Incredible PBX Automatic Update Utility

Every time you log into your server as root, Incredible PBX will ping the IncrediblePBX.com web site to determine whether one or more updates are available to bring your server up to current specs. We recommend you log in at least once a week just in case some new security vulnerability should come along. Also be sure to check the PBX in a Flash RSS Feed inside the GUI for the latest security alerts.

Mastering the Incredible PBX Applications

Your next stop should be a quick read of the Application User’s Guide for Incredible PBX. Even though the target audience was Raspberry Pi users, the feature set is identical, and this guide will tell you everything you need to know about the dozens of applications for Asterisk that have been installed on your new server.

We also want to encourage you to sign up for an account on the PIAF Forum and join the discussion. In addition to providing first-class, free support, we think you’ll enjoy the camaraderie. Come join us!

Originally published: Wednesday, July 8, 2015


Support Issues. With any application as sophisticated as this one, you’re bound to have questions. Blog comments are a terrible place to handle support issues although we welcome general comments about our articles and software. If you have particular support issues, we encourage you to get actively involved in the PBX in a Flash Forums. It’s the best Asterisk tech support site in the business, and it’s all free! Please have a look and post your support questions there. Unlike some forums, ours is extremely friendly and is supported by literally hundreds of Asterisk gurus and thousands of users just like you. You won’t have to wait long for an answer to your question.



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash 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.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. Ironically, the word "GPL" only appears once on the FreePBX web site, and that’s to remind you that Sangoma’s commercial "modules are not Open Source GPL and are only designed to work with CentOS or RHEL systems." []
  2. With some providers including ones linked in this article, Nerd Vittles receives referral fees which assist in keeping the Nerd Vittles lights burning brightly. []

60 Seconds to Real Independence: Incredible PBX GUI Comes to VirtualBox

As we continue the march toward a truly free, RealGPL, open source VoIP platform for Asterisk®, we couldn’t think of a better time of the year for this announcement. Today we’re pleased to introduce our first virtual machine platform with an Incredible PBX™ GUI image that you can install in less than 60 seconds on virtually any desktop computer in the world. When the install is finished you’ll have the latest Asterisk 11 running atop Scientific Linux™ 6.6 with version 12 of the new Incredible PBX GUI. You’ll also have the very first Asterisk aggregation with native support for OAUTH authentication and secure communications using Google Voice. And it’s all FREE. No Gotchas!

Think of Incredible PBX as the glue stick that assembles all the necessary VoIP components into a state of the art Linux platform and holds them together seamlessly. As with all Incredible PBX builds, you also get the full complement of goodies including dozens of text-to-speech apps, voice dialing, SMS messaging, free fax support, reminders and wakeup calls, and SECURITY! The difference with the VirtualBox® platform is you get a turnkey install of everything on any desktop computer in less than one minute! That includes Windows PCs, Macs, Linux desktops, and even Solaris machines.

Is VirtualBox merely a sandbox for experimentation? Absolutely not. With any of the beefier desktop computers today, running Incredible PBX as a 24/7 VirtualBox image is every bit as feature rich with stellar performance, and it’s equivalent to using dedicated hardware. And there are some added advantages. Obviously, deploying a turnkey VoIP platform in under a minute is a major plus. But, unlike using a dedicated Linux platform, you also get the ability to take snapshots of your system and do full backups in minutes instead of the hours required to bring down dedicated hardware, load a different backup application using a different operating system, perform a backup, and then reboot your VoIP server. And your backups won’t just run on the one server on which the backup was performed. You can restore the backup to any other computer that can run VirtualBox. For any of you that came from a network management background, you know what a big deal that really is. And there’s one more bonus. With Incredible Backup and Restore, you can move to dedicated hardware running the same operating system with Asterisk 11 and the same version of the Incredible PBX GUI in minutes.

Need to deploy VoIP servers at dozens of sites around the globe? Not a problem with VirtualBox. Just send a preconfigured VirtualBox image to each site and install VirtualBox on a local desktop computer. In 60 seconds, you’ll have a functional VoIP server including interconnectivity to all of your other VoIP servers with a virtual private network already in place to provide secure VoIP connectivity between all of your sites.

Are there security compromises using the VirtualBox platform? Not at all. Incredible PBX comes preconfigured with the Linux IPtables firewall that is locked down to a whitelist of local area networks, preferred providers, and your own IP addresses. You can expand the whitelist using the add-ip and add-fqdn scripts or use PortKnocker and Travelin’ Man 4 tools to let remote users gain instant access.

So What’s All the GPL Fuss About? It’s about FREEDOM, the freedom to use or not use the GPL modules you wish to use without enduring false alerts that your system has been compromised and without being blocked from removing components that produce revenue for Sangoma®… as the GPL requires. It’s about FREEDOM to redistribute or resell the product AS IS… as the GPL requires. It’s about FREEDOM to examine and modify ALL of the source code using ALL of the tools and components necessary, not just ones Sangoma has chosen to provide… as the GPL requires. It’s about FREEDOM to add GUI components to your server with No Gotchas whether or not the individual modules were produced by Sangoma… as the GPL requires.


If you support the GPL and use open source projects, then you owe it to yourself and to the GPL community to get up to speed and get involved! Can’t we all just get along? You bet… when everyone does what they’ve agreed to do. Spend an hour or two of your Independence Day reading some of the Nerd Vittles commentary on FreePBX® and the GPL.

BUY 3 STAMPS and let Sangoma and Digium hear from you. Don’t be shy. It’s about your FREEDOM.

William J. Wignall, President and CEO
Sangoma Technologies
100 Renfrew Drive, Suite 100
Markham ON L3R 9R6 CANADA

Danny Windham, CEO
Digium, Inc.
445 Jan Davis Drive Northwest
Huntsville, AL 35806 USA

Mark Spencer, Founder and CTO
Digium, Inc.
445 Jan Davis Drive Northwest
Huntsville, AL 35806 USA

Getting Started. For today, we’ll provide a refresher course on loading VirtualBox and the Incredible PBX virtual image. Then we want to spend a little time explaining the secret sauce that goes into building these images so that you can do it yourself either to migrate to a different network or to deploy at multiple sites. It’s called open source for a reason! When we’re finished, you’ll know everything we’ve learned about deploying VirtualBox machines and, unlike Grandma and some GUI platforms, we won’t leave an important ingredient out of the recipe just to be sure you never forget how good Grandma’s cookies really were. So let’s get started.

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.

Downloading the Incredible PBX GUI Virtual Machine

A word of warning on the front end. Today’s Incredible PBX image featuring Asterisk 11 for VirtualBox is huge! The Scientific Linux 6.6 image with version 12 of Incredible PBX GUI is nearly 3GB. Be patient. You only have to download it once. Just click on the 11-12.3 .OVA image in this SourceForge link and start the download to your desktop. Then go have a nice lunch.

Importing & Configuring Incredible PBX Virtual Machines in VirtualBox

You only perform the import step one time. Once imported into VirtualBox, Incredible PBX is ready to use. There’s no further installation required, just like an OpenVZ template… only better. Double-click on the .ova file you downloaded to begin the procedure and load it into VirtualBox. When prompted, be sure to check the Reinitialize the Mac address of all network cards box and then click the Import button. Once the import is finished, you’ll see a new Incredible PBX virtual machine in your VM List on the VirtualBox Manager Window. We need to make a couple of one-time adjustments to the Incredible PBX VM configuration to account for differences in sound and network cards on different host machines.

Click on the Incredible PBX Virtual Machine in the VM List. Then click Settings -> Audio and check the Enable Audio option and choose your sound card. Save your setup by clicking the OK button. Next click Settings -> Network. 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. Finally, click Settings -> System, uncheck Hardware clock in UTC time, and click OK. That’s all the configuration that is necessary for your Incredible PBX Virtual Machine. The rest is automagic.

Running Incredible PBX Virtual Machines in VirtualBox

Once you’ve imported and configured the Incredible PBX Virtual Machine, you’re ready to go. Highlight IncrediblePBX Virtual Machine in the VM List on the VirtualBox Manager Window and click the Start button. The boot procedure with your chosen operating system will begin just as if you had installed Incredible PBX on a standalone machine. 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 VirtualBox window. Always gracefully halt Incredible PBX just as you would on a dedicated 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. To access Incredible PBX GUI with a browser, point to the IP address of your virtual machine. Then, in the Administrator window, click on Incredible GUI Administration. Login as admin with the admin password you set below. For the security of your server, we recommend that you log in to the Linux CLI at least once a week so that Incredible PBX updates get applied to your server regularly. This is critically important if you care about your phone bill.

When logging in for the first time, Incredible PBX will go through some setup steps and then reboot. Login again to complete the setup. status will always provide a snapshot of your system. To shut down Incredible PBX gracefully, click in the VM window with your mouse, log in as root, and type: halt. Be sure to complete the following setup steps from the Linux CLI:

  • Change your root password: passwd
  • Set your Incredible GUI admin password: /root/admin-pw-change
  • Set the admin password for web apps: htpasswd /etc/pbx/wwwpasswd admin
  • Set your correct time zone: /root/timezone-setup
  • Add WhiteList entries to firewall if needed: /root/add-ip or /root/add-fqdn
  • Store PortKnocker credentials in a safe place: cat /root/knock.FAQ
  • Enable Incredible Fax support if desired: /root/incrediblefax11.sh
  • Login to your NeoRouter VPN server if desired: /root/neorouter-login

Upgrading Modules with Module Admin in the GUI. The GUI includes a Module Administration component in the Admin tab which will let you check online for new modules and upgrade to newer releases. Once you have added or updated any modules, you will get some nasty error messages in the System Status display because we allow installation of all GPL-compatible modules, not just those of Sangoma. It’s one of the proprietary gotchas that we have been writing about. Simply click on the X option in the upper right corner of each window to remove the warnings. Log out of the GUI. Then login to your Linux CLI as root and issue the following command to permanently clear the error messages: gui-fix. Now you can log back in and the warning messages will be gone… until you add or update modules again. Sangoma calls it a feature. 🙄

Command Line Management of Incredible PBX with VirtualBox

One of the real beauties of VirtualBox is you don’t have to use the VirtualBox GUI at all. The entire process can be driven from the command line. Other than on a Mac, here is the procedure to import, configure, and run Incredible PBX:
 
VBoxManage import IncrediblePBX-11-12.3-SL66.ova
VBoxManage modifyvm "IncrediblePBX-11-12.3-SL66" --nic1 nat
VBoxManage modifyvm "IncrediblePBX-11-12.3-SL66" --acpi on --nic1 bridged
VBoxHeadless --startvm "IncrediblePBX-11-12.3-SL66" &
# Wait 1 minute for Incredible PBX to load. Then decipher IP address like this:
VBoxManage guestproperty get "IncrediblePBX-11-12.3-SL66" /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/IP
# Now you can use SSH to login to Incredible PBX at the displayed IP address
# Shutdown the Incredible PBX Virtual Machine with the following command:
VBoxManage controlvm "IncrediblePBX-11-12.3-SL66" acpipowerbutton

On a Mac, everything works the same way except for deciphering the IP address. Download our findip script for that. Be sure to plug in the correct name of your virtual machine: ./findip IncrediblePBX-11-12.3-SL66

Deploying Google Voice Secure Communications with Incredible PBX

As with all prior releases of Incredible PBX, free calling in the U.S. and Canada with Google Voice is an integral component of this GPL platform. You still add Google Voice trunks using the GUI in exactly the same way: Connectivity -> Google Voice (Motif). What has changed under the covers with this release is what happens behind the scenes. Google has warned (for years) that they plan to phase out plain text passwords using your actual Google Voice credentials. This is for your protection! Unfortunately, until today, the only way to take advantage of the new OAUTH authentication method with Asterisk was to use one of the external SIP gateways to Google Voice. Now you no longer have to. The new 11-12.3 release of Incredible PBX adds native OAUTH authentication support to Asterisk and the Incredible PBX GUI. When prompted for the password in setting up your Google Voice accounts in the GUI, now you’ll enter your OAUTH token instead of your plain text password. It’s that easy. Obviously, you first need to obtain a free OAUTH token for each of your Google Voice accounts that you wish to activate. This tutorial on the PIAF Forum will walk you through the simple, one-time procedure.

IMPORTANT: Once you have added one or more Google Voice trunks in the GUI, you must restart Asterisk to activate the trunks: amportal restart

We want to take a moment and express our heartfelt thanks to Ryan Tilton of GVsip.com for setting up and maintaining the free platform to support OAUTH tokens for Google Voice. And a special shoutout to Martin Dindos (a.k.a. @dziny on the PIAF Forum) for his truly Herculean efforts in getting this to work properly with Asterisk 11, no small feat. This is yet another amazing testament to how the open source community should really function. Thank you!

Preparing Incredible PBX Virtual Machine for Backups & Migration

To us, the most compelling feature of the virtual machine platform is the ease with which you can make a perfect backup of your server in minutes! From that backup, you can restore a working platform in the same 60 seconds it took to build today’s platform on your desktop. One of the drawbacks as the Linux operating systems have become more turnkey is the shortcut that was implemented on both the RedHat and Debian/Ubuntu platforms to store your network setup so that the server reboots more quickly. While that’s fine for rebooting on the same server, it’s a real problem if you attempt to move your setup to different hardware or a new network because your network configuration will not load properly on the new platform. That means no IP address! Here’s the easy way to assure that things will actually work after the move. It assumes you will have a DHCP server at the new location just as you did at your existing site.

The Easy Way. If you have console access after the VM image is restored on the new platform (which means you don’t need a network IP address for the server in order to log in as root), then the easy way to prepare any of the Incredible PBX machines for relocation is to issue the following commands before you halt the system and make a VirtualBox backup:

touch /etc/update_hostconfig
touch /etc/update_serverconfig
rm -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host*
rpm -e openssh-server openssh-xinetd
yum -y install openssh-server openssh-xinetd
rm /etc/ssh/*.rpmsave

Once you have halted the server, edit both the sound card and network card settings and disable both of them in VirtualBox Manager. Then choose File -> Export Appliance from the VirtualBox title bar and create an .ova backup image on your desktop. You now have an image that is similar to the Incredible PBX image that you originally downloaded, except it has all of your data and settings. All you have to do is repeat the install drill above at the new location using the .ova image you created and log in with whatever your current root password happens to be. You’ll get a two-pass automatic setup just as you did when you began today’s adventure.

The only drawback to this procedure is the fact that the extension 701 and default DISA passwords as well as your firewall configuration will be initialized when you first boot from your .ova image at the other location. Aside from that, you’ll have a clean platform with new SSH and DUNDI credentials as well as mostly sanitized log files.

What’s Next. Now that you have a functioning server, it’s time to learn all about the Incredible PBX applications that are ready for use. Jump over to the latest Nerd Vittles application tutorial for a quick look at what’s available. Even though it was written for the Asterisk-GUI, everything will work exactly the same way. That’s the beauty of the Incredible PBX platform. Enjoy!

Originally published: Monday, June 29, 2015


Support Issues. With any application as sophisticated as this one, you’re bound to have questions. Blog comments are a terrible place to handle support issues although we welcome general comments about our articles and software. If you have particular support issues, we encourage you to get actively involved in the PBX in a Flash Forums. It’s the best Asterisk tech support site in the business, and it’s all free! Please have a look and post your support questions there. Our forum is extremely friendly and is supported by literally hundreds of Asterisk gurus.



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash 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.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  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. []

Keeping It Real: Holey Socks! It’s the Missing FreePBX GPL Source Code, Or Is It?

If you’ve ever shopped at the outlet malls, you quickly learn that things are often not quite as they appear on first blush. Labels inside shirts have either been removed or mangled in some way to keep you from returning the merchandise to a ‘real store’ for a refund at full retail price. Socks in particular always have a habit of sprouting a hole after you’ve worn them about twice. For those that were ever in the military, you may recall that the Post Exchange always had name-brand shirts for about half the price of the regular men’s stores. They were quite a deal… as long as your favorite colors were pink and purple. Let’s face it. These manufacturers think they’re smarter than we are, and all these sleights of hand are no accident. They’re purposeful actions engineered to assure that we don’t get something for nothing.

All FreePBX gpl source is available at http://t.co/7z6lXPVwVo and mirrored at https://t.co/n9Cu46hFRV #asterisk #showyourcode

— James Finstrom (@geek3point0) June 8, 2015
Source: twitter.com/geek3point0/status/607910432385441793


All FreePBX gpl source is available at http://t.co/7z6lXPVwVo and mirrored at https://t.co/n9Cu46hFRV #asterisk #showyourcode

— James Finstrom (@geek3point0) June 15, 2015
Source: twitter.com/geek3point0/status/610447235852201986


So what do retail merchandising tricks have to do with Sangoma® and FreePBX® source code? You’ve probably seen the weekly ads on Twitter touting the availability of GPL source code for FreePBX.1 So life is good, right? What’s the problem?

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
Dr. Joseph Goebbels… among others*

‘CliffsNotes-like Version’ of the GPL… with apologies to CliffsNotes™

Ever Dealt with a DOP? That’s not a typo for DOPE. Quite the contrary, these aren’t dumb people. In fact, they are folks that think they’re smarter than the rest of us. Our new word "DOP" means somebody you suspect is being Dense on Purpose. We’ve gone around and around on Twitter this week with the FreePBX developers who repeatedly have claimed they’ve released "ALL FreePBX GPL source code" while we have suggested just the opposite. So let’s dumb it down to a single paragraph with short sentences that even a Fifth Grader can understand…

FreePBX is a GPL product. FreePBX consists of TWO components. A GUI generates Asterisk code. A Cloud-based CDN provides updated modules to make FreePBX continue to work. FreePBX won’t continue to function properly without its CDN. Thus, the GPL says BOTH components must be licensed as GPL code. The GPL requires ALL corresponding source for ALL integral components. A GPL toolkit that generates crippled source doesn’t cut it. A toolkit with strings attached doesn’t suffice. A toolkit that only functions properly if you agree to pay Sangoma’s legal expenses does not comply with the GPL source requirement. Toolkits are fine and may be required components under the GPL but… Source means SOURCE CODE. The source requirement means ALL the actual code necessary to replicate ALL of the uncrippled functionality of the original GPL product. GPL Source "means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities." Source means ALL the same source that the FreePBX product itself uses to make the product fully functional in an uncrippled, unrestricted manner.

So Sangoma… SHOW ME (ALL) THE SOURCE!

CliffsNotes is a trademark of HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT. Reference is a simile only. CliffsNotes makes no product associated with the GPL.

The Rest of the Story for Those That Enjoy Reading

For those that have used the FreePBX GUI, you quickly learn that the best feature of this GPL-touted product is its ability to automatically update all of its included modules with three button clicks. Clicking Check Online gives you an instantaneous snapshot of every component in the GUI and every update that’s available. Clicking Upgrade All tags all of your modules that have an update available. Clicking Process brings all of your modules current. It works exactly the same way whether you have one module to update or twenty. It’s simple, easy, and quick. You couldn’t ask for a better upgrade design.

The deal, of course, with GPL software is that you’re entitled to get the source code with the application itself so that you can make changes and improvements if you choose to do so. We’ve been outspoken critics of the fact that Sangoma doesn’t meet that requirement. And these weekly Twitter ads presumably are their response suggesting that they do. So let’s take a careful look at the ‘GPL Source’ that Sangoma says they’re providing and do a little experiment to find the hole in the socks.

To make this Module Admin component of FreePBX work, you need two pieces: the FreePBX GUI software itself AND the FreePBX Cloud component that houses the (hidden) GPL modules for FreePBX. Sangoma provides only one of the two necessary components. In a previous article, we showed how to build the cloud component to independently maintain the FreePBX GPL modules. The implication from the Twitter ads is that you can build the equally important cloud component using the ‘GPL source’ provided in either Sangoma’s GIT repository or on GitHub. Otherwise, the source code provided yields a crippled version of FreePBX in which the critical Module Admin component wouldn’t function properly. In other words, the GitHub ‘GPL Source’ wouldn’t be the real source code necessary to make the GPL product work as designed. It speaks volumes about the type of "open source" folks we’re dealing with when you come to appreciate that a single Apache command switch (Options +Indexes) is all that would be necessary for Sangoma to provide the Real Source Code™.

So let’s do a simple experiment. First, download the touted ‘GPL Source’ for the Core module that’s buried in GitHub. Next, download the Core module that’s hidden in Sangoma’s Cloud repository. This is the one that’s actually used to update FreePBX using the Module Admin tool explained above. Now let’s expand the tarballs and compare the contents. The GitHub-touted source is pictured on the left. The "real source" from the Sangoma repository is on the right. Can you guess which one will actually work in the cloud repository to make Module Admin and FreePBX function properly?

By comparing the contents of the two tarballs, you’ll notice several things. First, the file names are different. This naming convention is critically important to the FreePBX Module Admin component. One works. One doesn’t. Second, the time stamps on the individual components are different. This is a tell-tale sign that the two tarballs were generated using different programs, none of which have been provided. Third, the "real source" file is over 6,000 bytes larger than the GitHub version. Expanding the two files as we have done above tells you why. The "real source" (on the right) has an extra signature file that is missing from the GitHub version. Not only is the signature file missing, but so is the program to actually generate it.2 This is critically important because FreePBX 12 uses these signature files to determine whether a module is legitimate. Guess which one passes that test?

There’s actually another missing piece that the Sangoma ads and GitHub repositories fail to acknowledge: the XML file for each FreePBX version and the scripts to actually generate the contents of these files. These XML files tell the Module Admin component what modules have been updated and what the checksums for the modules are. The XML files in the cloud and for the individual modules are essential in assuring that you don’t destroy your server by installing a partially downloaded component that cripples the functionality of the FreePBX GUI or brings down your telephone system.

In conclusion, FreePBX is the antithesis of open source and violates the basic tenets of the GPL. Not only is the platform anything but open, but its real source is shrouded in secrecy together with the tools to make the product functional. This is not the way GPL open source projects are supposed to work, and Sangoma should know better. They’ve been a long-time supporter of the open source community.

The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. [Emphasis added.]

Pinocchio would be proud. Standing alone without its hidden components, FreePBX has become the poster child for CrippleWare with its missing pieces and half-baked source code. Giving Sangoma the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume that Sangoma had no knowledge of any of this and chalk it up to the Schmoozers pulling a fast one on the new boss to protect their still-to-be-paid profits from Year One sales of FreePBX commercial offerings. After all, that was the silver lining in the Sangoma purchase contract.

Dear Sangoma: NOW YOU KNOW!

What happens going forward is on your watch, not the previous owners. Sangoma now owns the FreePBX product and is obliged to provide the "real source code" for the program and all of its critical components in accordance with the GPL. We trust that after reading this (and we’ve mailed them a copy), Sangoma will choose to do the right thing for the Asterisk community upon which its livelihood depends. Abide by the terms of your GPL license and release the "real source code" for all of the critical components of FreePBX including all of its GPL modules and all of the pieces necessary to make the cloud repository, XML local and cloud components, and signature generation and checking mechanisms function as designed and integrated into your FreePBX product.

For the rest of the story…

Epilogue. After release of our article, the lead FreePBX developer, Philippe Lindheimer, finally documented Online Module Management… after 9 years of secrecy. Better late than never! This was followed by a posting from Rob Thomas that sought to document the process of writing a new FreePBX module. Anyone with an interest in the GPL and open source software should read both of them. Here are two guys whose entire livelihood is thanks to the open source community. Yet they both tout the FreePBX Distro which is neither open source nor GPL code. Here’s what’s missing with the current FreePBX GUI. Their focus appears to be on the process for introducing new modules into FreePBX, a process that remains proprietary. Our focus has been on obtaining the source for the existing components of the FreePBX GUI. There still is no way to independently replicate the Cloud-based CDN component of FreePBX 12 with the same modules that FreePBX uses because that "open source software" has not been provided. The new FreePBX 12 design requires a PROPRIETARY KEY in order to produce any modules for the FreePBX "GPL" platform. That includes any attempt to replicate the original FreePBX components. Bottom Line: You cannot replicate the same source code that FreePBX 12 uses in the Cloud using the tools provided by the FreePBX developers. And that is a no-no under the GPL unless the apparatus to produce and manage the original keys is also provided. The GPL requires release of the original source upon which the FreePBX platform operates, not a toolkit and not a reworked version using different source resulting in different modules. Providing proprietary tools to generate different source with different module components is NOT the same as original source code… as the GPL requires.

As one of our PIAF Forum users suggested, this design would make perfect sense for a proprietary platform such as the FreePBX Distro, and the developers would do everyone in the open source community a favor by migrating the technology there while restoring the original GPL design of the FreePBX GUI.3

Originally published: Monday, June 15, 2015  Updated: Friday, June 19, 2015   Epilogue: Monday, June 22, 2015



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash 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.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. Following publication of our article, the ads on Twitter from the FreePBX Community Manager were removed from public view, not exactly the Sangoma response we had hoped for. Now the GPL Source Code AND the ads are hidden. NEWS FLASH: The ads have now reappeared. Coming on the heels of this article, that would appear to be an official FU from Sangoma that they do not intend to release the module source components hidden in their CDN cloud. []
  2. After release of this article, one of the FreePBX developers suggested that the GPL FreePBX Development Tools could be used to build your own Cloud component for FreePBX. There are several problems with that. First, these tools and their output are for development use only and were never intended for use with FreePBX in a production environment. Second, the tools require a (revocable) "key" issued by FreePBX. In and of itself, that makes FreePBX proprietary. Third, this key requires a user to sign a blank check legal indemnification agreement to cover all of Sangoma’s legal expenses (reasonable or otherwise) should they be sued for anything associated with that key. Without a key, unsigned modules (including those from FreePBX’s own GitHub source tree) would generate nasty compromised server messages in the GUI. So, no, providing a toolkit to build crippled source is not the same as providing the actual source code upon which FreePBX relies for proper operation, i.e. the XML and TGZ files hidden in the Sangoma Cloud which in Sangoma-speak is euphemistically described as their content delivery network (CDN). []
  3. We will not get into the developer’s claim in footnote 1 that these FreePBX security breaches were not caused by "a FreePBX exploit" but instead were the result of an "unauthorized module installed on them that was named ‘Admin Dashboard.'" In point of fact, the unauthorized module was detected by some early users of FreePBX 12; however, the exploit that resulted in the introduction of the Trojan module was most definitely caused by a FreePBX exploit, an acknowledged security vulnerability "within the legacy FreePBX ARI Framework module/Asterisk Recording Interface (ARI)." It was that exploit that allowed the introduction of the Trojan module in the first place. As we have often suggested, this vulnerability never would have occurred if all of the aggregations including the FreePBX Distro had provided a locked down firewall as part of their distribution. []

Introducing Incredible PBX 11-12 with Incredible GUI for the Ubuntu 14 Platform

On May 15, we turned the page on Asterisk® GUIs by introducing a new GUI that hopefully provides the best of both worlds. It preserves the GPL components of the FreePBX® product that many of us have nurtured for almost a decade while removing the commercial pieces that have introduced some friction into the equation for users and companies that simply wished to deploy or redistribute a graphical user interface for Asterisk in accordance with the free GPL licenses under which the product and its components were licensed. Last week we did much the same thing with the essential cloud component which serves as the lynchpin for GPL module administration within the GUI itself. Hopefully, these two tweaks will encourage Sangoma, the new owner of the FreePBX project, to do the right thing and get the non-commercial pieces of the project back on the right track moving forward. What we did not want to do was tarnish the incredibly hard work that dozens of developers in the open source community have poured into this project over the past decade. We continue to be amazed at what they’ve been able to achieve, and we salute their accomplishments. The Asterisk 12 and 13 revolution never would have been achieved without the contributions of the FreePBX development team. We think the new Incredible PBX GUI stands as a testament to what can be accomplished while preserving the true spirit of open source development and the terms of the GPL licenses under which this product and its numerous modules were licensed.

Two weeks ago, we introduced the all-new Incredible PBX with Incredible GUI for CentOS, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux. Last week we added a Cloud-based GPL repository and all the tools necessary to maintain it. Today we’re pleased to release the production-ready version for the Ubuntu 14 platform with all the bells and whistles including Incredible Fax featuring HylaFax and AvantFax. Today’s release mimics the functionality of the previous build for the CentOS platform with literally dozens of turnkey applications that show off the very best features of Asterisk®. In addition to Incredible PBX, you also get our new GPL repository to maintain release 12 of the GUI. No strings, no gotchas, and no murky licenses. Pure GPL!

Building an Ubuntu 14.04 Platform for Incredible PBX

As a result of the trademark and copyright morass, we’ve steered away from the bundled operating system in favor of a methodology that relies upon you to put in place the operating system platform on which to run PBX in a Flash or Incredible PBX. The good news is it’s easy! With many cloud-based providers1, you can simply click a button to choose your favorite OS flavor and within minutes, you’re ready to go. With many virtual machine platforms such as VirtualBox, it’s equally simple to find a pre-built Ubuntu 14.04 image or roll your own.

If you’re new to VoIP or to Nerd Vittles, here’s our best piece of advice. Don’t take our word for anything! Try it for yourself in the Cloud! You can build an Ubuntu 14.04 image on Digital Ocean in under one minute and install today’s Incredible PBX for Ubuntu 14.04 in about 15 minutes. Then try it out for two full months. It won’t cost you a dime. Use our referral link to sign up for an account. Enter a valid credit card to verify you’re who you say you are. Create an Ubuntu 14.04 (not 14.10!) 512MB droplet of the cheapest flavor ($5/mo.). Go to the Billing section of the site, and enter the following promo code: UBUNTUDROPLET. That’s all there is to it. A $10 credit will be added to your account, and you can play to your heart’s content. Delete droplets, add droplets, and enjoy the free ride!

For today, we’ll walk you through building your own stand-alone server using the Ubuntu 14.04 mini.iso. If you’re using Digital Ocean in the Cloud, skip down to Installing Incredible PBX 11-12 (HINT: 11 tells you the Asterisk release and 12 tells you the GUI release). If you’re using your own hardware, to get started, download the 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr" Minimal ISO from here. Then burn it to a CD/DVD or thumb drive and boot your dedicated server from the image. Remember, you’ll be reformatting the drive in your server so pick a machine you don’t need for other purposes.

For those that would prefer to build your Ubuntu 14.04 Wonder Machine using VirtualBox on any Windows, Mac, or existing Linux Desktop, here are the simple steps. Create a new virtual machine specifying the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. Allocate 1024MB of RAM (512MB also works fine with a swap file) and at least 20GB of disk space using the default hard drive setup in all three steps. In Settings, click System and check Enable I/O APIC and uncheck Hardware Clock in UTC Time. Click Audio and Specify then Enable your sound card. Click Network and Enable Network Adapter for Adapter 1 and choose Bridged Adapter. Finally, in Storage, add the Ubuntu 14.04 mini.iso to your VirtualBox Storage Tree as shown below. Then click OK and start up your new virtual machine. Simple!

Here are the steps to get Ubuntu 14.04 humming on your new server or virtual machine once you’ve booted up. If you can bake cookies from a recipe, you can do this:

UBUNTU mini.iso install:
Choose language
Choose timezone
Detect keyboard
Hostname: incrediblepbx < continue >
Choose mirror for downloads
Confirm archive mirror
Leave proxy blank unless you need it
< continue >
** couple minutes of whirring as initial components are loaded **
New user name: incredible
< continue >
Account username: incredible
< continue >
Account password: makeitsecure
< continue >
Encrypt home directory < no >
Confirm time zone < yes >
Partition disks: Guided - use entire disk and set up LVM
Confirm disk to partition
Write changes to disks and configure LVM
Whole volume? < continue>
Write changes to disks < yes> < -- last chance to preserve your disk drive!
** about 15 minutes of whirring during base system install ** < no touchy anything>
** another 5 minutes of whirring during base software install ** < no touchy anything>
Upgrades? Install security updates automatically
** another 5 minutes of whirring during more software installs ** < no touchy anything>
Software selection: *Basic Ubuntu server (only!)
** another couple minutes of whirring during software installs ** < no touchy anything>
Grub boot loader: < yes>
UTC for system clock: < no>
Installation complete: < continue> after removing installation media
** on VirtualBox, PowerOff after reboot and remove [-] mini.iso from Storage Tree & restart VM
login as user: incredible
** enter user incredible's password **
sudo passwd
** enter incredible password again and then create secure root user password **
su root
** enter root password **
apt-get update
apt-get install ssh -y
sed -i 's|without-password|yes|' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -i 's|yes"|without-password"|' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -i 's|"quiet"|"quiet text"|' /etc/default/grub
update-grub
ifconfig
** write down the IP address of your server from ifconfig results
reboot
** login via SSH to continue **

Installing Incredible PBX 11-12 on Your Ubuntu 14.04 Server

Adding Incredible PBX 11-12 to a running Ubuntu 14.04 server is a walk in the park. To restate the obvious, your server needs a reliable Internet connection to proceed. Using SSH (or Putty on a Windows machine), log into your new server as root at the IP address you deciphered in the ifconfig step at the end of the Ubuntu install procedure above. First, make sure to run the update step for Ubuntu below before you begin the install. This is especially important if you’re using a cloud-based Ubuntu 14 server.

WARNING: As of early June, 2016, Ubuntu has introduced a bug in their latest MySQL upgrade. Do NOT run apt-get upgrade for the time being, or your Incredible PBX install will fail.

apt-get update && touch /root/COPYING

WARNING: If you’re using a 512MB droplet at Digital Ocean, be advised that the DO Ubuntu setup does NOT include a swap file. This may cause serious problems when you run out of RAM. Uncomment ./create-swapfile-DO line below to create a 1GB swap file which will be activated whenever you exceed 90% RAM usage on Digital Ocean.

Now let’s begin the Incredible PBX 11-12 install. Log back in as root and issue the following commands:

cd /root
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx11-12.2-ubuntu14.tar.gz
tar zxvf incrediblepbx*
#./create-swapfile-DO
./Incredible*

Once you have agreed to the license agreement and terms of use, press Enter and go have a 30-minute cup of coffee. The Incredible PBX installer runs unattended so find something to do for a bit unless you just like watching code compile. When you see "Have a nice day", your installation is complete. Write down your admin password for the GUI as well as your three "knock" ports for PortKnocker. If you forget your admin password or wish to change it, just run: /root/admin-pw-change. Retrieve your PortKnocker setup like this: cat /root/knock.FAQ.

Log out and back in as root and you should be greeted with a status display that looks something like this after the Automatic Update Utility runs:

Perform the following steps:

Make your root password very secure: passwd
Set your correct time zone: ./timezone-setup
Restart Asterisk: amportal restart
Create admin password for web apps: htpasswd -b /etc/pbx/wwwpasswd admin newpassword
Make a copy of your other passwords: cat passwords.FAQ
Make a copy of your Knock codes: cat knock.FAQ
Decipher IP address and other info about your server: status

Incredible PBX includes an automatic update utility which downloads important updates whenever you log into your server as root. We recommend you log in once a week to keep your server current. Now would be a good time to log out and back into your server at the Linux command line to bring your server up to current specs.

You can access the Incredible PBX GUI using your favorite web browser to configure your server. Just enter the IP address shown in the status display.

When the Kennonsoft menu (shown above) appears, click on the User tab to open the Admin menu. Then click on Incredible GUI Administration to access the Incredible PBX GUI. The default username is admin with the randomized password you wrote down above. If desired, you can change them after logging into the GUI by clicking Admin -> Administrators -> admin. Enter a new password and click Submit Changes then Apply Config. Now edit extension 701 so you can figure out (or change) the randomized passwords that were set up for default 701 extension and voicemail: Applications -> Extensions -> 701.

Setting Up a Soft Phone to Use with Incredible PBX

Now you’re ready to set up a telephone so that you can play with Incredible PBX. 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’ll need the IP address of your server plus your extension 701 password. Choose Settings -> Accounts and click the New button. Fill in the blanks using the IP address of your server, 701 for your account name, and whatever password you created for the extension. Click OK.

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:

123 - Reminders
222 - ODBC Demo (use acct: 12345)
947 - Weather by ZIP Code
951 - Yahoo News
*61 - Time of Day
*68 - Wakeup Call
TODAY - Today in History

The next step is establishing an interface on your PBX to connect to the telephones in the rest of the world. If you live in the U.S., the easiest way (at least for now) is to use an existing (free) Google Voice account. Google has threatened to shut this down but as this is written, it still works with previously set up Google Voice accounts. The more desirable long-term solution is to choose several SIP providers and set up redundant trunks for your incoming and outbound calls. The PIAF Forum includes dozens of recommendations to get you started.

Configuring Google Voice

If you want to use Google Voice, you’ll need a dedicated Google Voice account to support Incredible PBX. If you want to use the inbound fax capabilities of Incredible Fax 11, then you’ll need an additional Google Voice line that can be routed to the FAX custom destination using the GUI. The more obscure the username (with some embedded numbers), the better off you will be. This will keep folks from bombarding you with unsolicited Gtalk chat messages, and who knows what nefarious scheme will be discovered using Google messaging six months from now. So keep this account a secret!

We’ve tested this extensively using an existing Google Voice account, and inbound calling is just not reliable. The reason seems to be that Google always chooses Gmail chat as the inbound call destination if there are multiple registrations from the same IP address. So, be reasonable. Do it our way! Use a previously configured and dedicated Gmail and Google Voice account, and use it exclusively with Incredible PBX 11.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to enable the Google Chat option as one of your phone destinations in Settings, Voice Setting, Phones. That’s the destination we need for The Incredible PBX to work its magic! Otherwise, all inbound and outbound calls will fail. If you don’t see this option, you’re probably out of luck. Google has disabled the option in newly created accounts as well as some old ones that had Google Chat disabled. Now go back to the Google Voice Settings.

While you’re still in Google Voice Settings, click on the Calls tab. Make sure your settings match these:

  • Call ScreeningOFF
  • Call PresentationOFF
  • Caller ID (In)Display Caller’s Number
  • Caller ID (Out)Don’t Change Anything
  • Do Not DisturbOFF
  • Call Options (Enable Recording)OFF
  • Global Spam FilteringON

Click Save Changes once you adjust your settings. Under the Voicemail tab, plug in your email address so you get notified of new voicemails. Down the road, receipt of a Google Voice voicemail will be a big hint that something has come unglued on your PBX.

One final word of caution is in order regardless of your choice of providers: Do NOT use special characters in any provider passwords, or nothing will work!

Now you’re ready to set up your Google Voice trunk in the GUI. After logging in with your browser, click the Connectivity tab and choose Google Voice/Motif. To Add a new Google Voice account, just fill out the form. Do NOT check the third box or incoming calls will never ring!

IMPORTANT LAST STEP: Google Voice will not work unless you restart Asterisk from the Linux command line at this juncture. Using SSH, log into your server as root and issue the following command: amportal restart.

If you have trouble getting Google Voice to work (especially if you have previously used your Google Voice account from a different IP address), try this Google Voice Reset Procedure. It usually fixes connectivity problems. If it still doesn’t work, enable Less Secure Apps using this Google tool.

And here’s another way to access Google Voice securely using an inexpensive commercial SIP gateway:

Troubleshooting Audio and DTMF Problems

You can avoid one-way audio on calls and touchtones that don’t work by entering these simple settings in the GUI: Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. Just plug in your public IP address and your private IP subnet. Then set ULAW as the only Audio Codec.

Adding Speech Recognition to Incredible PBX

To support many of our applications, Incredible PBX has included Google’s speech recognition service for years. These applications include Weather Reports by City (949), AsteriDex Voice Dialing by Name (411), and Wolfram Alpha for Asterisk (4747), all of which use Lefteris Zafiris’ terrific speech-recog AGI script. Unfortunately (for some), Google now has tightened up the terms of use for their free speech recognition service. Now you can only use it for "personal and development use." If you meet those criteria, keep reading.

First, log into your server as root and issue the following commands:

# for Ubuntu and Debian platforms
apt-get clean
apt-get install libjson-perl flac -y
# for RedHat and CentOS platforms
yum -y install perl-JSON
# for all Linux platforms
cd /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin
mv speech-recog.agi speech-recog.last.agi
wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zaf/asterisk-speech-recog/master/speech-recog.agi
chown asterisk:asterisk speech*
chmod 775 speech*
nano -w speech-recog.agi

Here’s how to activate speech recognition on Incredible PBX. Don’t skip any steps!

Now you’re ready to try out the speech recognition apps. Dial 949 and say the name of a city and state/province/country to get a current weather forecast from Yahoo. Dial 411 and say "American Airlines" to be connected to American.

To use Wolfram Alpha by phone, you first must install it. Obtain your free Wolfram Alpha APP-ID here. Then run the one-click installer: /root/wolfram/wolframalpha-oneclick.sh. Insert your APP-ID when prompted. Now dial 4747 to access Wolfram Alpha by phone and enter your query, e.g. "What planes are overhead." Read the Nerd Vittles tutorial for additional examples and tips.

A Few Words about the Incredible PBX Security Model for Ubuntu

Incredible PBX for Ubuntu 14 is a very secure, turnkey PBX implementation. As configured, your server is protected by both Fail2Ban and a hardened configuration of the IPtables Linux firewall. Nobody can access your PBX without your credentials AND an IP address that is either on your private network or that matches the IP address of your server or the PC from which you installed Incredible PBX. Incredible PBX is preconfigured to let you connect to many of the leading SIP hosting providers without additional firewall tweaking.

You can whitelist additional IP addresses for remote access in several ways. First, you can use the command-line utilities: /root/add-ip and /root/add-fqdn. You can also remove whitelisted IP addresses by running /root/del-acct. Second, you can dial into extension 864 (or use a DID pointed to extension 864 aka TM4) and enter an IP address to whitelist. Before Travelin’ Man 4 will work, you’ll need to add credentials for each caller using the tools in /root/tm4. You must add at least one account before dial-in whitelisting will be enabled. Third, you can temporarily whitelist an IP address by successfully executing the PortKnocker 3-knock code established for your server. You’ll find the details and the codes in /root/knock.FAQ. Be advised that IP addresses whitelisted with PortKnocker (only!) go away whenever your server is rebooted or the IPtables firewall is restarted. For further information on the PortKnocker technology and available clients for iOS and Android devices, review the Nerd Vittles tutorial.

HINT: The reason that storing your PortKnocker codes in a safe place is essential is because it may be your only available way to gain access to your server if your IP address changes. You obviously can’t use the command-line tools to whitelist a new IP address if you cannot gain access to your server at the new IP address.

We always recommend you also add an extra layer of protection by running your server behind a hardware-based firewall with no Internet port exposure, but that’s your call. If you use a hardware-based firewall, be sure to map the three PortKnocker ports to the internal IP address of your server!

The NeoRouter VPN client also is included for rock-solid, secure connectivity for remote users. Read our previous tutorial for setup instructions.

As one would expect, the IPtables firewall is a complex piece of software. If you need assistance configuring it, visit the PIAF Forum for some friendly assistance.

Adding Incredible Fax 11 to Your Server

Once you’ve completed the Incredible PBX install, log out and log back in to load the latest automatic updates. Then reboot. Now you’re ready to continue your adventure by installing Incredible Fax 11 for Ubuntu. Special thanks to Josh North for all his hard work on this! The latest download includes the Incredible Fax 11 installer. So just run the script:

cd /root
./incrediblefax11_ubuntu14.sh

Accept all of the defaults during the installation process. IMPORTANT: Once you complete the install, reboot your server. After rebooting, log into the GUI and choose Module Admin and enable the AvantFax module. When you log out of the GUI, there now will be an option for AvantFax on the GUI’s main login screen. Choose it and enter admin:password to login and change your default password. You also can set your AvantFax admin password by logging into the Linux CLI and… /root/avantfax-pw-change.

Incredible Backup and Restore

We’re pleased to introduce our latest backup and restore utilities for Incredible PBX. Running /root/incrediblebackup will create a backup image of your server in /tmp. This backup image then can be copied to any other medium desired for storage. To restore it to another Incredible PBX 11 server, simply copy the image to a server running Asterisk 11 and the Incredible PBX 11-12 GUI. Then run /root/incrediblerestore. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Incredible PBX Automatic Update Utility

Every time you log into your server as root, Incredible PBX will ping the IncrediblePBX.com web site to determine whether one or more updates are available to bring your server up to current specs. We recommend you log in at least once a week just in case some new security vulnerability should come along. Also be sure to check the PBX in a Flash RSS Feed inside the GUI for the latest security alerts.

Mastering the Incredible PBX Applications

Your next stop should be a quick read of the Application User’s Guide for Incredible PBX. Even though the target audience was Raspberry Pi users, the feature set is identical, and this guide will tell you everything you need to know about the dozens of applications for Asterisk that have been installed on your new server.

We also want to encourage you to sign up for an account on the PIAF Forum and join the discussion. In addition to providing first-class, free support, we think you’ll enjoy the camaraderie. Come join us!

Originally published: Monday, June 1, 2015


Support Issues. With any application as sophisticated as this one, you’re bound to have questions. Blog comments are a terrible place to handle support issues although we welcome general comments about our articles and software. If you have particular support issues, we encourage you to get actively involved in the PBX in a Flash Forums. It’s the best Asterisk tech support site in the business, and it’s all free! Please have a look and post your support questions there. Unlike some forums, ours is extremely friendly and is supported by literally hundreds of Asterisk gurus and thousands of users just like you. You won’t have to wait long for an answer to your question.



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash 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.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. With some providers including ones linked in this article, Nerd Vittles receives referral fees which assist in keeping the Nerd Vittles lights burning brightly. []

Freedom and the FreePBX Cloud: Is an Apple-like Ecosystem GPL-Compliant?

Short Answer: No way, José!     Right Answer: Sangoma should fix it.     Our Answer: New GPL Repo fixes it… today!

We began our series on FreePBX® by providing a GPL-compliant alternative to the base design of the FreePBX GUI minus the elements which have made redistribution and/or code modification difficult despite the clear language of the product’s GPL licenses. In our last article, we introduced new turnkey versions of Incredible PBX for CentOS featuring your choice of the 2.11 or 12.0 Incredible PBX GUI. Coming soon will be new releases of Incredible PBX for the Ubuntu, Debian, and Raspbian platforms so hang in there.

This week we begin our examination of the actual FreePBX design and the morphing that has taken place. We want to give you the full picture of why this led to our decision to no longer support the FreePBX approach to "GPL" software design. We also will provide some additional GPL tools that open up the platform in the way the GPL license requires.

It’s important for everyone to understand the impact of commercialization on project development when organizations bend the rules to suit their own commercial purposes. None of this was Sangoma’s doing. But FreePBX is now Sangoma’s GPL project, and it’s up to them to clean up the mess. For openers, nobody forced the FreePBX developers to release the FreePBX code with a GPL license. But they did it… almost 10 years ago! Only after the product became hugely popular did these folks apparently conclude that maybe giving away their software wasn’t such a good idea after all. You can track when the wheels came off the bus by looking at the project’s history on SourceForge. Not surprisingly, it coincides with SchmoozeCom’s entry into the picture. As Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation would tell you, this isn’t about whether code is open source software. Some FreePBX modules are and many are not. But providing source code is merely one aspect of the GPL. So let’s start with some of the actual language from the GPL license:

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. [Emphasis added.]

Today we want to cover the first of several topics you won’t ever hear about in a (commercial) "advanced" training class for FreePBX. In case you haven’t attended one of these lovefests, the training is intended to let (paying) students learn how to customize the settings of the GUI for others willing to pay someone to build them a PBX. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that unless you believe everything associated with free software should be free. We don’t. In any case, you’ll learn how to create extensions and ring groups, inbound and outbound routes, trunk setups, and many of the other (basic) things that Nerd Vittles has been covering (for free) for years. And, of course, you will learn how to market the FreePBX brand and Sangoma-produced commercial modules.

What you won’t hear is anything about the inner workings of FreePBX much less how to customize the product for your own use, i.e. the types of modifications envisioned by the clear terms of the GPL. Those GPL "features" are available on a per customer basis for substantial "customization fees." Translation: roughly the same cost as a new Hyundai for your kid headed off to college. And there’s one other hidden surprise. Even with custom branding of FreePBX, you will remain a captive in the so-called FreePBX ecosystem.

If you’ve enjoyed Apple’s App Store approach to system lock-in, then you’ll feel right at home with FreePBX. The wrinkle is that the FreePBX approach is even more restrictive than Apple’s. For openers, anyone wishing to sell their own commercial module need not apply. Unlike Apple, no commercial offerings from anyone but Sangoma are permitted in the FreePBX ecosystem. Imagine if Digium had adopted a similar approach by barring modules from competing hardware companies from interfacing with Asterisk®. Where would that have left Sangoma? In the case of FreePBX, even if you want to give away a FreePBX-compatible GPL module, you’re out of luck with FreePBX 12 unless you’re willing to underwrite Sangoma’s unlimited legal expenses if they ever get sued. Note our emphasis on unlimited. Sangoma claims they merely copied a general indemnification provision used by others such as Rackspace. But, as one of our readers pointed out:

The link that they claim they used as a template is one I would sign. Sangoma reworded things so that ALL liability is yours, even if an issue arises in their code that affects your code (after the fact). Sangoma in that case, is responsible but YOU have to pay for their legal fees. You cannot have a final say in settlements, they do. They can select whatever priced attorneys they want (you have no say). There is no ‘reasonable’ word usage. They dropped it.

As for your GPL module, yes, you can manually load it and run it without signing the indemnification agreement, but users will have to endure nasty warnings and emails every day which suggest that their server has been compromised.1 Apple, on the other hand, screens free and non-free additions to their App Store and includes literally thousands of third-party apps without anyone having to pay Apple’s legal fees. FreePBX proclaims that "Free Stands for Freedom" but…

I’m reminded of a book that was published during the Vietnam War era: "Military Justice is to Justice As Military Music is to Music." If this is Sangoma’s idea of freedom, I’m not quite sure why anyone would want it except for the fact that they’re the only GUI game in town. The Sherman Act may be unfamiliar territory in Canada, but it might be worth a careful look.

Here’s where the GPL breaks down. Despite the best of intentions, the GPL drafters believed that handing someone the source code for a program was the best way to insure freedom to redesign and redistribute computer programs. That works well when the computer program is a couple hundred lines of code, but it breaks down quickly when you’re dealing with a program that’s been commingled with a commercial Cloud-based hosting service shrouded in secrecy and you’re staring at a million lines of code that can best be described as "engineered obfuscation." Think of it as handing someone a plate of your grandma’s cookies and, when asked for the recipe, you say, "All of the ingredients are right there in front of you." Yes, but…

This is a critically important point so let’s cover it in the context of FreePBX. What do you get and what do you not get when you install or use the product? Because the FreePBX GPL modules are written in unencrypted PHP code, you automatically get the source code when you install each module. It used to be that you also could acquire the modules on a public web site provided by the developers, now Sangoma. As noted last week, that openness came to a screeching halt with FreePBX 12. Until our repository was made available, you could scour the web high and low, but you wouldn’t find the GPL "free" modules for FreePBX 12 in a format directly usable by the FreePBX GUI and its Module Admin update feature which is perhaps the best feature of the GUI. In fact, until today, the only way to acquire the modules in a usable format with error correction was through the FreePBX GUI interface itself using the proprietary, hidden "ecosystem" maintained by Sangoma. The acquisition process itself is buried deep in a million lines of spaghetti code. Yes, you can get the source code, but…



Sangoma hopefully will ponder the words of Richard Stallman, the Founder and President of the Free Software Foundation:

Clearly that server does not respect our freedom, and we should refuse to use it, for the most part.

If we use a GUI for PBX’s, we should load our modules in some way that treats us decently.

So why the mystery with acquisition of FreePBX modules? The simple is answer is that it restricts everyone’s freedom. You can’t redistribute FreePBX without keeping Sangoma and the "non-free" FreePBX ecosystem in the middle of the equation. This provides the ongoing platform for Sangoma to peddle the sale of (only) their branded SIP trunking service as well as (only) their commercial modules. This may be their idea of freedom, but…

Last week we provided the first glimpse of freedom providing a means to break away from the trademark gimmicks of the mothership by using our reengineered GPL GUI with our repository of GPL modules for the new product. What you still lacked was the freedom to break away from our universe and go your own way. Why? Because the FreePBX developers have never revealed their Cloud’s secret sauce much less the tools necessary to create your own GPL module repository and have it function properly within the GUI. Without the cloud access and control, you lose the key module update and monitoring capabilities of the product itself plus the ability to upgrade the GUI to a later version. We used to call this CrippleWare, software with only limited functionality unless you cough up the big bucks. They’ll tell you that it’s all in the source code…

Well, not quite all. FreePBX is open source GPL software minus the secret sauce hidden in Sangoma’s Cloud which is the antithesis of the freedom component of the GPL. If you don’t appreciate the difference and why this runs counter to the GPL, read Richard Stallman’s explanation here. Because Cloud access by design is the only means provided in the FreePBX GUI to load new GPL modules, or to check for and update existing modules, or to upgrade the FreePBX GUI itself,2 the Cloud component is clearly an integral component of FreePBX. As such, it also must be licensed under the GPL and all its source code made available. In the words of the Free Software Foundation:

I’d like to incorporate GPL-covered software in my proprietary system. Can I do this?

You cannot incorporate GPL-covered software in a proprietary system. The goal of the GPL is to grant everyone the freedom to copy, redistribute, understand, and modify a program. If you could incorporate GPL-covered software into a non-free system, it would have the effect of making the GPL-covered software non-free too.

A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version of that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program must be released under the GPL if it is released at all. This is for two reasons: to make sure that users who get the software get the freedom they should have, and to encourage people to give back improvements that they make.

However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program.

The difference between this and “incorporating” the GPL-covered software is partly a matter of substance and partly form. The substantive part is this: if the two programs are combined so that they become effectively two parts of one program, then you can’t treat them as two separate programs. So the GPL has to cover the whole thing.

If the two programs remain well separated, like the compiler and the kernel, or like an editor and a shell, then you can treat them as two separate programs—but you have to do it properly. The issue is simply one of form: how you describe what you are doing. Why do we care about this? Because we want to make sure the users clearly understand the free status of the GPL-covered software in the collection.

If people were to distribute GPL-covered software calling it “part of” a system that users know is partly proprietary, users might be uncertain of their rights regarding the GPL-covered software. But if they know that what they have received is a free program plus another program, side by side, their rights will be clear.

Of course, every new module release brings a new opportunity to change the file and directory structure hidden in the Cloud to once again disguise the secret components required for proper GUI operation. Trust us. They have. Why else would you change a file name from modules-12 to all-12 except to conceal its identity? It’s called security through obscurity. Try searching your server for all-12 and see what you find. This hidden file is what locks you into the Sangoma commercial ecosystem. They call it freedom. It’s really anything but that. A more descriptive label would be a hidden, proprietary GOTCHA. You get some of the source code to make FreePBX work properly, but…

Building an Independent GPL Cloud Repository for the Incredible PBX GUI

Today we’re going to fix this deficiency at least for those using the new Incredible PBX GUI by offering independently developed GPL code that provides the freedom to build your own Cloud-based ecosystem should you wish to do so. We would encourage Sangoma to do the right thing. Stop listening to the former owners of the FreePBX project and become a good GPL steward. It’s your project now. You’ve owned it for almost six months! You’re also a better company than the one you bought. So start acting like it. Bring the FreePBX Cloud-based components out into the open and provide the tools necessary to use them as your GPL product license requires.

What we are providing today are all the components necessary to build an independent GPL Cloud that is compatible with the Incredible PBX GUI. This includes a base install of existing GPL modules that are compatible with versions 2.11 and 12 of FreePBX plus the toolkit to maintain an independent GPL Cloud. To load future modules and updates into your repository, you’ll need a Linux LAMP server running the latest version of Apache and at least PHP 5.4. Neither Asterisk® nor FreePBX is required on the server platform. Be advised that CentOS 6.5 and 6.6 ship with PHP 5.3 so you’ll need to perform the following steps to bring your server up to the 5.4 or 5.5 version of PHP before proceeding. Be advised that your GPL Cloud will only work with GPL-licensed versions of Incredible PBX running the 2.11 or 12 release of Incredible PBX GUI. See last week’s tutorial to get started.

Before we begin, several cautionary notes are in order. First, we can’t control Sangoma’s behavior. Assuming they decide not to comply with the GPL by keeping their Cloud service proprietary, a simple tweak on their end could change the location of their Cloud’s secret sauce at any time. That could very well break the ability to download future GPL modules from their repositories using this toolkit. But don’t worry. If that happens, we’ll be the first to let you know. We figured it out once, and we can figure it out again. You can run, but you cannot hide! We’ll also show you an alternative method to load new modules into your own repository. Second, don’t even think about using your own repository while retaining the original FreePBX GUI instead of updating to the Incredible PBX GUI. A single module update on their end could do a couple of things. It could overwrite the location of the module repositories and restore theirs. Or it could completely disable your server after detecting that you had changed the internal workings of FreePBX. Remember when Apple did just that with jailbroken iPhones? We’re not suggesting Sangoma would actually pull such a stunt. In fact, we don’t think Sangoma would ever stand for that despite a few developers that might have a different view. But we’re warning that it’s simply not worth the risk.

Before you elect to go your own way with your own repository, be advised that importing new FreePBX-compatible GPL modules without first testing each of them with the Incredible PBX GUI is a very bad idea for the reasons already mentioned. We intend to do that with the new Incredible PBX repository, and we would encourage you to adopt the same approach.

Finally, to protect the security and integrity of your GPL Cloud resources, do not include repo.php and the contents of its accompanying src directory in your public repository. Otherwise, anyone with public access to your server would be able to change the contents of your repository. The proper methodology would be to build and maintain your repository off line and then copy the files to a public web server without the tools used to actually create and update the GPL modules and accompanying XML files. The tools themselves are GPL code, and you are more than welcome to redistribute them pursuant to the GPL license. Just don’t post them in decompressed format in your repo thereby making them functional for anonymous attacks against your repository.

To begin, download GPL-repo.tar.gz from SourceForge and decompress the tarball into a folder on your private server:

mkdir repo
cd repo
touch index.html
wget -O GPL-repo.tar.gz http://sourceforge.net/projects/pbxinaflash/files/IncrediblePBX11.11%2B11.12%20with%20Incredible%20GUI/GPL-repo.tar.gz/download
tar zxvf GPL-repo.tar.gz
yum -y install php-simplexml

The file structure will look like this where modules and src are subdirectories:

Within the modules subdirectory will be a packages subdirectory that includes folders for each of the GPL modules. There’s also a licenses folder with all of the applicable GPL licenses.

Within each of the package directories, you will find one or two modules for the two currently supported GPL versions. For example, here are the entries for the framework module:

The lists of the available modules for each supported GPL version are contained in the .xml files in the top level directory: modules-2.11.xml and all-12.0.xml. modules-12.0.xml is a symlink to a previous nomenclature for version 12. These XML files are what Module Admin uses to check for updates available for existing modules on your PBX.

To add or update individual modules in your repository, issue one or both of the following commands using the actual name of the module you wish to add or update. You can decipher the actual names for the modules by checking the FreePBX source listings on GitHub. As we cautioned previously, don’t ever add or update modules without first testing the new module on an Incredible PBX server running the Incredible GUI. If an updated module blows things up, please let us know!

./repo.php 2.11 modulename
./repo.php 12.0 modulename

And here’s how to add any compatible module from any FreePBX 2.11 or 12 server or from GitHub to your repo. On the FreePBX platform, switch to the directory holding the modules: cd /var/www/html/admin/modules. By way of example, let’s assume there’s a javassh module directory.

1. Decipher the current version of the module: grep version javassh/module.xml
2. Create a gzipped tarball of that module including the version: tar -cvzf javassh-VERSION.tgz javassh/
3. Move javassh-VERSION.tgz to your /repo folder: mv javassh-VERSION.tgz /var/www/html/repo

Alternatively, you can use the included git-grab12 script to download the latest version 12 modules in tarball format directly from the FreePBX repository on GitHub:

From your /repo folder: ./git-grab12 modulename (there is no javassh version 12 module)

4. Assimilate the javassh module into your repo as either a 2.11 or 12.0 module or both:

cd /var/www/html/repo
./repo.php 2.11 javassh-VERSION.tgz
./repo.php 12.0 javassh-VERSION.tgz
rm -f javassh-VERSION.tgz

When you’re ready to go public, move the /repo folder and its subdirectories from your private server to a public web server, issue the following commands within the main destination directory on the public server to remove the GPL repo toolkit:

rm -f git-grab12
rm -f repo.php
rm -rf src

The final step is to tell the Incredible PBX GUI the new location of your module repository. For this, you will need a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) that points to the top-level directory of the repository stored on your public web server, e.g. http://myrepo.me.com. Once you have set up a DNS entry for this address and tested it to be sure it works, all you have to do is configure the GUI to find it. Issue the following command from the Linux CLI after logging into your server as root. Be sure to substitute your actual FQDN and your actual root password for MySQL if you have changed it from passw0rd. If you’re building a number of new servers, you could simply add this line to the end of the Incredible PBX install script. Be sure to copy the entire line below. It should end with double quotes.

mysql -u root -ppassw0rd asterisk -e "update freepbx_settings set value='http://myrepo.me.com' where keyword='MODULE_REPO' and description='repo server' limit 1"

Isn’t it amazing what you can do with some GPL code and a little documentation on how to use it? Freedom At Last!

Originally published: Tuesday, May 26, 2015


Support Issues. With any application as sophisticated as this one, you’re bound to have questions. Blog comments are a terrible place to handle support issues although we welcome general comments about our articles and software. If you have particular support issues, we encourage you to get actively involved in the PBX in a Flash Forums. It’s the best Asterisk tech support site in the business, and it’s all free! Please have a look and post your support questions there. Unlike some forums, ours is extremely friendly and is supported by literally hundreds of Asterisk gurus and thousands of users just like you. You won’t have to wait long for an answer to your question.



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.


 

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Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. According to a recent tweet from one of the developers, these warnings now can be disabled. That change was more than a year in coming. []
  2. The latest versions of the GPL modules are available in FreePBX’s GIT repo. UPDATE: Although tarballs are available for individual modules, even that format on GitHub would require painstaking, individual imports within the FreePBX GUI and totally defeats the design and purpose of the Module Admin component of FreePBX. []