PIONEERS Incredible PBX for Pogoplug 4

[wardmundy]

Bob Helbush:

 

[wardmundy]

Bob Helbush: Might wanna hold off a bit. Trying some suggestions from @dziny. Apache is definitely the problem child.

 

[Bob Helbush]

Bob Helbush: Might wanna hold off a bit. Trying some suggestions from @dziny. Apache is definitely the problem child.

Thanks for the heads up. Came up and ran. Resizing partition now.

 

[zhando]

I was wondering if freepbx or incrediblepbx is so strongly wedded to apache.

dziny suggestions are compelling. 60% of 128mb? Does he even bother with a swap drive?

 

[wardmundy]

I was wondering if freepbx or incrediblepbx is so strongly wedded to apache.

dziny suggestions are compelling. 60% of 128mb? Does he even bother with a swap drive?

MOTTO: Whatever works! Testing it now. Also swapped out sendmail with exim. Much easier to configure: dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

 

[dziny]

I do use swap (about 2x the size of ram). The system seems to be using it on occasions, currently according to freepbx from panel it is about 7% full. I suspect Linux has a mechanism where it moves parts of ram to swap if they are not used for a while. Btw ward I'm not using exim either, but sendmail. Some scripts if you are using chan_dongle have to be tweaked if you want to receive text messages to your email.

 

[wardmundy]

We use same amount of swap, and there's more good news. Performance is now Raspberry Pi-like, not a rocketship but certainly usable. We've pulled the Apache original because it really wasn't worth the time to download. We'll have a new image available hopefully this weekend. Thanks for the tip, dziny. lighttpd worked wonders.

 

[wardmundy]

Having played with this a bit more, I think what we'll do is push out an initial image with Asterisk 11 and FreePBX 2.11 and little else. Then everyone can experiment that wants to while we work on some of the Incredible PBX components. Looks like you may have a choice of full-featured FreePBX 2.11 or a trimmed down version of FreePBX 2.11 modules with the Incredible PBX components (similar to Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black builds). We'll just have to see.

 

[zhando]

The household PBX will stay on the cubox but the man cave could very well use iax2 trunking between the cubox and the pogoplug..

Will again snake the Monster USB3 cable from the pogoplug USB3 to a server case and a laptop hd.. We'll get some dual use out of the pogoplug from the remaining two interfaces: the SATA and USB2 - but just barely of course.

Dang it. I like putting idle hardware to work! Looking forward to that lean initial image.

 

[RPi-Fan]

lighttpd worked wonders.

Any thoughts about replacing apache2 with lighttpd the next time you do a Raspberry Pi release in order to save some memory and improve GUI performance?

 

[wardmundy]

Let's see how it goes with the PogoPlug first. So far I'm not seeing much improvement.

 

[wardmundy]

Well, this has been an interesting experiment to say the least. We've built both FreePBX-only and Incredible PBX images, and both are were painfully slow (more like impossible!) to manage in the FreePBX GUI on the Pogoplug. Special thanks to tm1000 for the fix. Now FreePBX works great.

Complete Nerd Vittles tutorial now available here.

If you prefer to manage FreePBX through a Cloud server, here's another option:

1. Take an image snapshot of your server with newest Incredible Backup which is included in the Pogoplug build: /root/incrediblebackup
No need to do it initially because we've included one in the build: /backup/DU-2014.09.07.10.07-A11.12.0-F2.11-I11.12.0.tar.gz)
2. Create a 512MB Droplet on Digital Ocean using Ubuntu 14 and Incredible PBX for Ubuntu. Follow the Nerd Vittles tutorial which also has a signup link to assist our projects. Coupon code: ALLSSD10 gets you a $10 credit this month. Once you're up and running, you may want to take a snapshot so that you can recreate droplets in the future without incurring hourly charges for the one you've built (whether it's running or not!). Digital Ocean 512MB droplets cost less than a penny an hour so this is not a big ticket item. When you finish with the droplet, just destroy it (once you've made a snapshot!). Then the money meter stops. First time build takes about 30 minutes.
3. Copy your backup image from step #1 to the /backup folder on your DO droplet. You will need to create the /backup folder first!
4. Restore the image: /root/incrediblerestore /backup/DU-2014.09.07.10.07-A11.12.0-F2.11-I11.12.0.tar.gz
5. Set your FreePBX admin password: /root/admin-pw-change
6. Open FreePBX on DO with a browser and log in as admin with your new password.
7. Make all the changes desired to your Incredible PBX setup. Be sure to reload FreePBX (red bar) when prompted before exiting!
8. Make a backup of your new setup: /root/incrediblebackup
9. Copy the file to /backup on your Pogoplug.
10. Restore the backup: /root/incrediblerestore /backup/DU-somefilename.tar.gz


Image for your Pogoplug SD card and tutorial to load is now available on SourceForge.

Quick Start Guide on first page of this thread.

 

[zhando]

One thing that stood out for me was the pokey performance of the sd card interface even with class 10 sd. I wasn't too concerned about it because I was planning to move /var and swap to an hd off the USB3..

Was any attempt made to run everything from the SATA interface? It's the fastest interface to my knowledge. Of course, if there's too much memory pressure between lightty, freepbx, asterisk, mysql etc - the system's going to die anyway.

 

[wardmundy]

Finally...

 

[wardmundy]

Went through the FreePBX reconfigure drill this morning just to be sure everything worked as expected. Here is the play-by-play...

1. Looked at watch while taking image snapshot of Incredible PBX on Pogoplug: /root/incrediblebackup
2. Built new Digital Ocean Ubuntu 14 droplet with Incredible PBX from an existing DO snapshot
3. Created /backup folder on DO droplet and copied over the backup
4. Restored the backup on DO droplet: /root/incrediblerestore
5. Changed the FreePBX admin password on DO droplet: /root/admin-pw-change
6. Logged into FreePBX on Digital Ocean droplet
7. Updated all FreePBX modules
8. Changed 701 extension and voicemail passwords
9. Added Google Voice trunk in FreePBX
10. Took an image snapshot of DO droplet: /root/incrediblebackup
11. Copied DO backup image over to Pogoplug and restored it: /root/incrediblerestore
12. Blew away the DO droplet to stop the money meter
13. Configured Yate softphone on desktop with new credentials for extension 701 on Pogoplug
14. Called into Pogoplug's Google Voice number from home office
15. Looked at watch answering call on ext. 701 on Yate softphone (perfect sound quality: 5% CPU and 25% RAM use by Asterisk)

Elapsed time: 15 minutes
DO Droplet charge: 1¢... would be the same if it took 2 hours

Nerd VIttles tutorial here

 

[wardmundy]

 

[tm1000]

I would be super curious to see the output of "amportal a dbug" on a pogoplug... (you run dbug before a page refresh, capture the output, paste here)

 

[wardmundy]

Thanks, tm1000

Doesn't do much good unfortunately. This is what I just got after attempting to load the FreeePBX GUI a full day after the MySQL socket issue had been resolved. It took a full 3 minutes for the default FreePBX page to appear. If I take a snapshot of the Pogoplug server with Incredible Backup and restore it to an Ubuntu droplet at Digital Ocean, everything works perfectly.

root@pogoplug:~# amportal a dbug
 
Please wait...
 
trying to run as user asterisk:
 
[FPBXDBUGDISABLE] already set to [0]
 
2014-Sep-07 19:39:11    /usr/share/php/DB/mysql.php:240
[WARNING]: mysql_connect(): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)
 
2014-Sep-07 19:39:11    /var/www/html/admin/libraries/utility.functions.php:203
[NOTICE]: Undefined index: DIE_FREEPBX_VERBOSE
 
^C
root@pogoplug:~# date
Mon Sep  8 19:11:14 EDT 2014

 

[wardmundy]

We finally tracked down the problem with FreePBX on the Pogoplug platform. Turns out MySQL didn't like the socket connection being made with localhost instead of 127.0.0.1. If you log out and back into your Pogoplug, the #11 patch will be applied. Yes, it's an interim fix. Yes, future FreePBX updates may break it. Yes, you can fix it (again) by logging out and back into your server. At least now you can access FreePBX with a browser. It's not the speediest platform, but it is usable (unlike before).

 

[phoneguy]

Its a IPV6 issue from what I recall before when someone else had the problem.