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The Most Versatile VoIP Provider: FREE PORTING
JUST RELEASED: Visit the Incredible PBX WikiTwo Thumbs Up: A New Flash Drive Installer for PBX in a Flash 2.0.6.4.5
We can’t promise you free sushi, but… one of the key goals of the PBX in a Flash™ project always has been to provide an install option that works reliably with USB thumb drives. And today’s new PIAF thumb drive installer with CentOS 6.4 provides support for every current version of Asterisk® and FreePBX®. In addition, you can build and deploy standalone servers for FreeSwitch™, SugarCRM™, NeoRouter™ VPN, YATE, and OpenFire™ XMPP using our award-winning 32-bit and 64-bit PIAF™ ISOs.
As luck would have it, CentOS followed the RedHat lead and pulled a 180 on the flash drive creation procedure with CentOS 6.4. You’ll recall in the CentOS 6.2 days, booting from a USB flash drive transformed that device into Drive A (sda) during the boot procedure. Well, that was then. Now it’s no longer ass-backwards so the procedure to create flash drive installers is officially different with CentOS 6.4.
As is true with the new PIAF 20645 stand-alone installers, the new flash drive installer performs a two-step installation procedure. During Phase I, CentOS 6.4 is installed after you pick your time zone and a root password. Once CentOS is installed, your server will reboot, display the server’s IP address, and prompt you to login with your new root password. You can do so from the console or via SSH or Putty. Once logged in, you have the option of loading additional drivers or beginning the Phase II installation procedure where you choose your desired version of Asterisk and FreePBX or one of the other supported applications.
The PIAF2 installer then syncs the time on your server to NTP, installs the latest yum updates for CentOS 6.4, installs the versions of Asterisk and FreePBX you selected (HINT: Incredible PBX 11 requires PIAF-Green and FreePBX 2.11) and some other utilities including WebMin, Festival and Flite text-to-speech support for Asterisk, and, of course, the Google Voice GUI which lets you configure PIAF2 to make free calls in the U.S. and Canada until May 2014. Finally the PIAF2 installer patches your system to activate the IPtables firewall for both IPv4 and IPv6 as well as adding Fail2Ban monitoring for Asterisk, SSH, and your Apache web server.
Our 20645 tutorial will walk you through the complete installation process once we have your USB thumb drive set up.
Here’s the 5-minute drill to get a USB thumb drive loaded with the latest and greatest PBX in a Flash ISO. Once you get that far, follow the PIAF 20645 installation tutorial to get your system up and running. In less than an hour, you’ll have a fully functioning, rock-solid reliable PBX that can meet all of your telephony requirements. And, remember, it’s free and always will be™.
Prerequisites. To get everything installed on your USB Flash Drive, you’ll obviously need at least a 1GB Flash Drive. HINT: 2GB flash drives may be cheaper! Next, you’ll need a Windows XP/Vista/7/8 computer on which to set up the thumb drive. On the Windows PC, you’ll need to download and install the latest, greatest version of ISO2USB from SourceForge. We recommend you also download and install the HP Formatting Utility for flash drives. Finally, you’ll need to download either the 32-bit or 64-bit PIAF 2.0.6.4.5 ISO from SourceForge.
Creating USB Flash Drive. Step #1 is to partition and format your USB flash drive as a FAT32 device. Some flash drives are temperamental about the formatting step. We can’t recommend strongly enough using the HP Formatting Utility to make certain you get a reliable, properly formatted thumb drive! Also be careful that you are, in fact, formatting your thumb drive and not your Windows hard disk!
Step #2, once the device is properly formatted, run ISO2USB. You’ll get a screen that looks like what is shown above. Click on the … button to the right of DiskImage ISO and choose the PIAF2 ISO that you downloaded to your Desktop. Make certain that the destination device shown on the bottom line of the display is your USB flash drive. You do not want to accidentally trash your primary drive!
Here’s the tricky part, and it’s not that tricky any more. You need to know the drive names of the devices on the target machine where you ultimately will be using this thumb drive. Try these commands on your target machine using a Linux LIVE CD if you’re unsure: dmesg | grep logical AND dmesg | grep sectors. For most modern machines with IDE drives, the names will be sda, sdb, etc. For older machines, they may be hda, hdb. You’ll know if it doesn’t work. 🙂
In the ISO2USB setup, we recommend you start with the default settings for the Hard Disk Name (sda) and USB Device Name (sdb). For Foxconn hardware and AMD BIOS machines, you may need to use sdc instead of sdb for the USB Device Name. A few other systems use sdd. In all cases, use sda for the Hard Disk Name. As we noted, you’ll know soon enough if you made the wrong choice. Just recreate the thumb drive using the next letter in the alphabet for the USB Device Name. 😉
Once you’ve double-checked your USB destination drive (HINT: the drive size is quite different), choose OK to begin. When the ISO install completes, don’t forget to Eject your USB flash drive before removing it from the Windows PC!
Using the USB Flash Installer. When using the new flash installer, remember that you need to boot your new machine from the thumb drive. On most newer Atom-based computers, you accomplish this by inserting the USB device, turning the machine on, and then pressing F12 during the boot sequence to choose the boot device. You’ll just have to watch the screen of your new computer to see if some other key is used to pull up the boot selection screen. If all else fails, you can adjust the boot sequence in the BIOS settings to boot first from the USB device. If you change your BIOS boot sequence, just remember to remove the USB device when the initial install of CentOS completes and the PIAF reboot sequence begins. If instead you again see the initial PIAF install screen warning you that your disk is about to be erased, then remove the thumb drive and reboot the machine once again. You’re now ready to continue on with the installation procedure. Just follow this link to the PIAF 20645 tutorial.
Where To Go From Here. If you installed PIAF-Green with Asterisk 11 and FreePBX 2.11 (our recommended platform for production use), then your next step probably should be the Nerd Vittles’ Incredible PBX 11 and Incredible Fax 11 tutorial. It’s a 5-minute addition. And, of course, all 50 Asterisk applications in Incredible PBX are also free.
Getting Your Own PIAF Thumb Drive. Some have asked how to obtain your very own PIAF thumb drive. Well, it’s easy. Just ask when you make a contribution of $50 or more to the Nerd Vittles and PBX in a Flash projects by clicking the PayPal Donate button at the top of this page, and we’ll get one off to you pronto. And, thanks in advance for your support of freeware and open source projects! Happy Thanksgiving!
Originally published: Friday, November 22, 2013
Just Released: AstriCon 2013 Videos. Digium has just released all of the videos from AstriCon 2013 on the new YouTube Asterisk Channel. It’s the best, free VoIP training you’ll find anywhere.
Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.
Or Try the New, Free PBX in a Flash Conference Bridge.
whos.amung.us If you’re wondering what your fellow man is reading on Nerd Vittles these days, wonder no more. Visit our new whos.amung.us statistical web site and check out what’s happening. It’s a terrific resource both for us and for you.
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…
Add SUSHI to Your Asterisk Server for Rock-Solid, Secure VoIP Telephony
When we began the PBX in a Flash project last November, one of our primary goals was to provide a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and Asterisk®-based, open source telephony server which could be easily upgraded without starting all over each time a new release of CentOS, or Asterisk, or FreePBX hit the street. We think we got it about right with our three utility programs: update-scripts, update-fixes, and update-source.
Update-scripts provides a refresh of the current set of utility scripts on your server. Update-fixes patches every known bug in all of the applications on your server. And update-source does just that. It brings the Asterisk source code up to date and optionally does the same thing with the CentOS operating system.
In keeping with our "No Tricks" pledge, all three applications rely upon "pull" technology which means you run the apps whenever you decide that you wish to update your system. And our latest Kennonsoft User Interface provides an on-screen RSS Feed to alert you in the event of a serious security issue, something the trixbox team could/should have put to good use to address a serious root exploit on virtually all trixbox systems just last week.
As you can see from the screenshot to the left, PBX in a Flash 1.3 is just around the corner with support for lots of new hardware including Intel’s new Atom motherboard which looks to be a real winner as a platform for VoIP telephony in the small business space.
What we wanted to do today is lay out our new SUSHI (Software Update Service – Hyperlinked, Interactive) program for some feedback. Previously, we have written about the financial dilemma that plagues most open source projects. As much as we enjoy working for less than 5¢ per hour, there comes a time when a modest pay raise is necessary. And that certainly applies to my two partners, Joe Roper and Tom King, who have tirelessly worked to make PBX in a Flash the very best, most flexible VoIP telephony server out there.
So here’s the deal. PBX in a Flash is and will always be free, current, and a GPL2-compliant open source project. When you download and install PBX in a Flash from the ISO, you typically get a system which is within days of being up to date with the current version of Asterisk 1.4 or 1.6 in either 32-bit or 64-bit flavors. No one else provides that flexibility much less a weekly code refresh. None of that will change!
Beginning later this year, we will introduce SUSHI, a completely optional, commercial Software Update Service incorporating update-scripts, update-fixes, and update-source for those that wish to subscribe. Simply stated, a lot of work and technical expertise goes into these three applications, and we believe it is only fair that people that continue to take advantage of the Software Update Service should contribute to the project and reimburse the development team for the one component that really sets our existing installs apart from all of the other aggregations. It also brings some much needed revenue into the PBX in a Flash project to fund future research and development.
Here’s the plan I’d like to propose to my partners. For those wishing to use the SUSHI applications, there would be an annual license fee of $30 per server. That’s $2.50 a month, about the same as a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Of that $30 annual fee, the PBX in a Flash Development Team would retain half to meet project needs. The balance of the money would be evenly split between the CentOS, Asterisk, and FreePBX projects. Stated another way, $15 would go to the PBX in a Flash Development Team, and we would contribute on your behalf $5 each to the CentOS, Asterisk, and FreePBX projects for every server signed up for the Software Update Service.
We’d love some feedback from the user community before we move forward, but we do plan to implement something later this year. So save your breath if your current mindset is that everything should always be free. When groceries, gas, housing, and automobiles are all free, we’re willing to reconsider. In the meantime, help us make this as equitable as we can possibly make it. Here’s a link to the discussion on the PBX in a Flash Forum. Feel free to register and add your $.02. Or you can post a comment here.
Today’s Best Read: Open Source VoIP: Asterisk or FreeSwitch by David Greenfield
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…
Free Asterisk Solutions