I HAVE A DREAM PIAF4 Is Coming?

rossiv

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I know its more Freepbx related but how about " cid inbound route with option of multiple numbers "

Perhaps if you expanded upon that in a new thread, we'd be able to figure out a solution? But yeah that is definitely a FreePBX enhancement, not PIAF.
 

MacNix

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I have only two wishes...

The first is is an actual upgrade system, which allows upgrades rather than requiring full reinstalls from the ground up.

IMO, Until that happens, PIAF is a toy. (yes, it's a cool toy.... but it's still not a full tool)..

Putting all these cute apps in to let you play games with Google phone, listen to the weather, or some other thing is fine... But when SHTF (and yes, it will, on ANY enterprise system, you'd better bet your ass on it), how are you going to recover?

Until there is a path to "reinstall with archive" (where one can reinstall the base setup without overwriting prefs and settings), PIAF is not a good option for anything more than a SOHO application.

I say this, having more than my share of the PIAF on location running.. But I also keep hard copy HDD backups of every unit, stored and shelved, ready to plug in.. That's an extra $100-200 per location, money spent solely due to a lack of something that even Apple came up with over a decade ago - the ability to reinstall without overwriting all users & prefs.. Most IT folks aren't going to be willing to put that into the equation.

I don't know if the folks behind PIAF want it to be a widely used thing or not, but I can't see it being seriously accepted in the real world without this being fixed.

Second: user account control..
As in, fixing the user level access to the fax option, and being able to hand out users accounts which are actually working.

IMO, these all-too-important issues are show stoppers from PIAF getting larger acceptance, so I'd say both should really be implemented sooner than later..


I bring this up, out of experience..

1. due to the lack of user access, i had to hand out the maint login, to someone who didn't have any business being behind a keyboard..

the customer bricked the box. yeah, bad move.

2 due to the lack of a reinstall option, I had to start from scratch on his system. and yes it was a painful lesson for him (he'll never do that again!), but one problem begets another.....
 

wardmundy

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MacNix: I could write a book on this, and maybe someday I will. You've nailed the two major issues with PIAF... and every other Linux-based server. In fact, it's the reason the stand-alone Incredible PBX builds came about in the first place. So let's get right to it...

#1 BACKUPS. PBX in a Flash had its historical roots in the Asterisk@Home and trixbox projects. Both were created the same way originally, on the fly from source code. The problem with backups using that design is you have to have a reference point to recreate a new image. Unfortunately, the operating system and Asterisk and FreePBX continue to evolve. That means your original snapshot may no longer work with the "improvements" that have come along over a period of years, and PBXs typically last for years. Without making complete image backups (and I appreciate they are painful since you have to shut down the server), there just is no other way.

#2 USER ACCOUNTS. PBX in a Flash started out using the FreePBX security methodology which was flexible in letting administrators create different accounts for different people. FreePBX runs as the asterisk user, and once someone breaks into your system, they get a blank check to all of your Asterisk, FreePBX, and most MySQL assets. The problem was/is that FreePBX is a collection of modules from many different people of varying skills, and many of them abandoned the project years ago leaving their code for others to maintain, or not. The ARI (Asterisk Recording Interface) module in particular is pretty awful. We got burned early on by a remote code execution bug in ARI and decided to switch to Apache security. While Apache security is not perfect, it has been damn near perfect for the past seven years. Yes, you lose login flexibility. No, you don't get hacked. And then along came the latest ARI mess with much smarter hackers. I'm not sure FreePBX Distro admins will ever recover their systems from this unless they had a hardware-based firewall or locked down IPtables setup in place. There were backdoors created all over the place. It was that ugly. Did PBX in a Flash systems get hacked? No. Is PBX in a Flash account management less flexibile? Absolutely.

Incredible PBX Security. And that brings us to Incredible PBX. It originally was an add-on to PIAF servers for bells and whistles, over three dozen of them at last count. One of those was Travelin' Man which has evolved into a flexible WhiteList security mechanism using the IPtables Linux firewall. That led to creation of new standalone Incredible PBX builds for a number of platforms: CentOS/Scientific Linux/Fedora, Ubuntu/Debian, and lots of mini-platforms including the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, CuBox, and even PogoPlug. We didn't adopt the PIAF security model opting instead to use FreePBX's native account management. But what we added was a locked down, WhiteList-enhanced IPtables firewall. And we also added Automatic Updates. Every time you log in to your server as root, the latest updates "from headquarters" get loaded on your server. Did the latest FreePBX ARI vulnerability affect Incredible PBX servers? Absolutely. Did anyone get hacked? No. Why? Because the preconfigured IPtables firewall kept the bad guys out AND we pushed out the FreePBX ARI patches within hours of release using the automatic update utility.

Incredible Backup. I share the frustration over backups. It's not that we haven't wrestled with backup methodologies for years looking for the silver bullet. There just isn't one that we have found for Linux servers. Mondo is close, but next year's Mondo may not work on last year's server, and vice versa. There's not a worse feeling than pulling out a backup to restore and having it blow up. I've had it happen with Apple's Time Machine, and I've seen it repeatedly with Mondo. So I don't use either of them. That led to Incredible Backup which takes a snapshot of your Asterisk and FreePBX setup. It can be restored to almost any server running the same major release of Asterisk and FreePBX. It works reliably with PIAF or Incredible PBX servers. With monthly or even quarterly full image backups, it is an excellent addition to provide snapshots in between. That's about as good as it gets in the Linux world. And frankly, that's about the same situation you find on the Windows and Mac platforms as well. If your PBX isn't worth a $100-$200 investment for a standby backup image, then get ready to roll up your sleeves and start over when the inevitable disk failure happens. For me personally, the solution was to migrate to a virtual machine platform where snapshots are a 10-minute chore, and you always have a half-dozen backup images. But I appreciate it may not be the best fit for those that have hundreds of users or still rely upon dozens of Ma Bell phone lines.

PIAF4 Future Direction. We're still wrestling with how to proceed in the next release. Everyone's input is encouraged.
 

Twilight Sparkle

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ooooooooo so cant wait to test this bad boy out..... i started to drool all over when i saw this
 

vic555

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Support for cross platform Fusionpbx and Freeswitch would be a dream come true.
 

Robert-BCC

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Not sure if this is PiaF territory, but I'd like to see a better default subject line for email-forwarded voice mail. The current default:
Subject: [PBX]: New message 1 in mailbox 22

Is not informative and is a bit silly. Telling the recipient (mailbox 22) that the message that they're about to listen to is for them is like having the postman tell you "The letter I put in your mailbox is for you." So maybe...
Subject: Voice mail from "Ward Mundy" <650-555-1212> Length: 0:43

Knowing the length of the message helps users decide if they should listen or delete. For example, telemarketers often hang up and create a 2 or 3 second "message". And knowing who called helps users decide if they want to listen, forward, and/or file the message.
 

billsimon

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Not sure if this is PiaF territory, but I'd like to see a better default subject line for email-forwarded voice mail.


Settings -> Voicemail Admin -> Settings submenu. Enter your prefered subject in the emailsubject field.
 

Robert-BCC

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Thanks Bill, I appreciate it! However, my thought was to change the default in PiaF v4 to "Voice Mail from ${VM_CALLERID}, Length: ${VM_DUR}" as I already know how to make the change on a current system.
 

billsimon

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Ah, no problem. Understood. I actually like the current default because I have several different mailboxes going to the same e-mail address.
 

hecatae

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I would like to see the ability to pick and chose what carriers get whitelisted or at the least, the option for none at all and let me add my own as I do now, but without having to delete all the unwanted entries.

It would also be nice to be able to enter a group of endpoint IPs to traveling man at the same time with the same permissions rather than ./add-fqdn and ./add-ip for each individual one.

Oh and how about having incredible backup grab the iptables stuff as well?


Can I echo this, dozen of trunks for services I will rarely/never use as I'm in the United Kingdom, just creates extra fluff to delete.

Would you consider adding OpenSuSE into the base distribution list?

For example, SuSE Studio https://susestudio.com/ allows you to create and publish images in a variety of formats, usb stick, .iso, .vmdk, .img, .vhd, .qcow2

They also have a lifecycle of 18 months, in fact you could make a minimal install, have the piaf or incrediblepbx script run at startup, have it hosted on susestudio on an official pbxiaf account and see how many people download it?

Other thoughts, would Piaf consider switching SQL to Postgresql?

With MySQL on the way out and MariaDB looking like a possible replacement, would or could PGSQL be an option?
 

sorvani

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Can I echo this, dozen of trunks for services I will rarely/never use as I'm in the United Kingdom, just creates extra fluff to delete.
.................
With MySQL on the way out and MariaDB looking like a possible replacement, would or could PGSQL be an option?


If you install CentOS 7 minimal, then run yum install mysql, it installs mariadb.

And gods yes, can we get an easy method to remove all the pieces we do NOT want. Actually, I would prefer to CHOOSE which extras I want added. I do not want to have to remove them.
 

synack

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Has anyone considered Gentoo for piaf?
It compiles everything, so there's support for almost any platform. It natively handles protecting config files for upgrades, will auto merge trivial changes and prompt you to fix what it can't figure out. there's excellent documentation for it everywhere. it even has great support for cross compiling and making binary packages if you really want to. heck is even trivial to setup distributed compiling (with cross compiling support).
It also solves issues with varying "features" as Gentoo implements something called "USE flags" that you define prior to install to tell the installer what option you want to USE.
Gentoo kinda sucks if you want a graphical interface like KDE or Gnome, as compiling a few hundred packages every time there is an update to those packages does take a while. For a "console" server it really rocks.
If enough are interested I would be willing to put some time and effort into it.
 

voip_user

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Is it possible to have an high availability module. I saw this talked about in other threads, but I don't know if it ever made it to production. I just deployed my 1st system friday. I'm getting ready to start my second one, however the disaster recovery options are kinda not what I'm looking for. It looks like warm standby is the best we can do at this point(someone correct me if I"m wrong I"m still learning). More than likely I will have a hot standby on site for hardware failure, but i wish it was a way to have two PIAF systems that would work in some sort of active/active or active/standby mode. I know asterisk itself supports this. I'm not sure how it would work in the PIAF world. Freepbx offers this with an add on module
 

wardmundy

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voip_user: No current plans for PIAF 3 anyway. You left out one little detail in the FreePBX offering:
Until October 31st [2014] we are offering a pre-release special of FreePBX HA that includes two node licenses for $2,250. Upon final release we estimate the cost of two licenses to be at least $3,000.

We do plan to support a commercial HA offering soon... with a much more reasonable price.
 

voip_user

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voip_user: No current plans for PIAF 3 anyway. You left out one little detail in the FreePBX offering:


We do plan to support a commercial HA offering soon... with a much more reasonable price.



Thank you so much. This is the one that is really worth paying for to me. I will feel comfortable deploying larger systems when we can have HA.
 

wardmundy

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As you probably know, the license fees are the least expensive component for HA. Price out all the components and networking, and then ask yourself if it's worth it.

It's not pure HA, but you can do much the same thing with daily backups and restores to two servers in different cities using RentPBX for about 1% of the cost of the HA solution. Once a phone system is set up and running, ask yourself what really changes during a typical workday? Usually it's voicemails and not much else. With daily (or even hourly) backups, what is your exposure in the case of disaster? Compare the costs, and I think you'll conclude that pure HA may be overkill in most situations. This obviously is a management decision that warrants careful consideration of the alternatives before leaping into the fire.
 

voip_user

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I never thought about doing it that way. I would have to see how many concurrent calls we can get with RentPBX. In a disaster mode I'm sure we can get away with not having 100 percent of the features, but I would still need at least 20-25 concurrent calls with the current project I"m working on. Other customer that maybe a great idea since they have around 10-15 concurrent calls max. Now my next question. When we failover how do I get all of the phones registered to a new system off site? I see people mention DNS, but A records can be slow to update. Is there a faster way to get all the phones re-registered? I'm still new so go easy if its something simple I missed :)
 

synack

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What would it take to implement srv resource records in SIP with priority and weighting for sets connecting to servers?
like:
Code:
_sip_server.udp.domain.local. in srv 10 5 5060 server1.domain.local.
_sip_server.udp.domain.local. in srv 10 10 5060 server2.domain.local.
_sip_server.udp.domain.local. in srv 20 10 5060 backup1.domain.local.
_sip_server.udp.domain.local. in srv 20 10 5060 backup2.domain.local.
It's already a spec of sorts, just waiting for a good dynamic call routing algorithm and a centralized/replicated database.
lol. so simple! :p

Does anyone know if the SIP sets generally already support SRV RR?
 

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