R.I.P. RentPBX

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This may not belong here but . . .
Does anyone know how to get support from RentPBX. Three to four years ago, I had a customer who wanted his PBX hosted in the cloud. I found RentPBX mentioned at NerdVittles (a site I refer to often :) ) and set up their PBX there using their PIAF wizard. The PBX went up easily and has been running fine until recently. The version of PIAF though is woefully outdated today. It is Incredible GUI 12.0.30 with Asterisk 13.5.0 running on Centos 6.7. Recently our trunk provider Flowroute went to failover POPs. On newer implementations, I add the IP ranges to the Match Permit field to allow these failover POPs to be accepted for inbound calls to the PBX. I see no such field in this older version. When I look at the config files, all of them say Do Not Edit. If I change these, FreePBX rewrites them on the next reload. If I put my changes in pjsip.identify_custom.conf, they do not seem to have any effect. I could have syntax issues but I am not sure. Upgrading this version of PIAF in the past has never worked for me; only a new install.

Anyway my solution with the customer was to upgrade the PBX to the latest PIAF/Incredible where I do have the necessary fields in the GUI. Trouble is I cannot seem to figure out how to do the upgrade without tearing down the old system. This customer has quite an extensive configuration. I have been opening tickets with RentPBX for weeks. I get no response whatsoever. After a period of time they do send me an email that they are closing the ticket. This is not the first time I have opened tickets with RentPBX and never receive any response other than the close email.

If anyone can help either with Match Permit in my existing version or with getting in touch with RentPBX, I'd be grateful.

Otherwise, buyer beware of RentPBX. You'll be out there alone.
 

krzykat

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Create a new trunk for each of their new IP's they give you. Also, make sure that their IP's are able to get through in your IPtables.
 

AndyInNYC

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I believe all the trunk settings are stored in /etc/asterisk/sip_additional.conf.

You can create in Word/Notepad/Excel/whatever a "cut and paste document" and change the trunk name/IP and then copy and paste it in to the .conf file.
Make a copy of the original (cp /etc/asterisk/sip_additional.conf /etc/asterisk/sip_additional.conf.orig) just in case something goes wrong.

Andrew
 

billsimon

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Anyway my solution with the customer was to upgrade the PBX to the latest PIAF/Incredible where I do have the necessary fields in the GUI. Trouble is I cannot seem to figure out how to do the upgrade without tearing down the old system. This customer has quite an extensive configuration

gg3, I believe your best path would be to build out the new PBX and copy configuration over from old to new by hand. I realize that it will probably be a lot of work but it will be worth it because you will have a known clean configuration you have built. You can copy voicemail by using tar to grab the whole voicemail directory structure and copy it to the new server and untar.

Ultimately PJSIP's "Match" method will be the best way to handle incoming traffic from Flowroute's many servers.

You can create in Word/Notepad/Excel/whatever a "cut and paste document" and change the trunk name/IP and then copy and paste it in to the .conf file.
Make a copy of the original (cp /etc/asterisk/sip_additional.conf /etc/asterisk/sip_additional.conf.orig) just in case something goes wrong.

Whatever you do, do NOT do this... Guaranteed not to work!
 

phonebuff

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@gg3 Same boat and same experience with RentPBX. When time permits I will be gone with a hand edit transfer.. Probably the vultr platform(s). Think they are taking the cash from those that stay and one of these days the last one out will shut off the lights,

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billsimon - That was my plan but I cannot get to RentPBX support to assist with the logistics. Guess I will have to move the PBX somewhere else.
 
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I am closing this thread. Thank all who responded.

For the record: No response ever from RentPBX despite opening the ticket again and a plea for response. Today they closed the ticket again; their only response.

If anyone from RentPBX ever monitors this forum, I sent this email today:
I am writing to you to express my opinion to your stall and hopefully your upper management.

YOU HAVE THE WORST TECHNICAL SUPPORT I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY 40 YEARS OF COMPUTING.

THAT IS, NO SUPPORT AT ALL.

YOU DO NOT FIX ISSUES! YOU DO NOT RESPOND TO TICKETS OTHER THAN TO CLOSE THEM!

YOU DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMERS! YOU MUST NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS!

SHAME ON YOU. I HOPE YOU GO OUT OF BUSINESS.

I will find a new host and discontinue all business and referrals to RentPBX.
 

krzykat

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I am closing this thread. Thank all who responded.

For the record: No response ever from RentPBX despite opening the ticket again and a plea for response. Today they closed the ticket again; their only response.

If anyone from RentPBX ever monitors this forum, I sent this email today:

SHAME ON YOU. I HOPE YOU GO OUT OF BUSINESS.

I will find a new host and discontinue all business and referrals to RentPBX.

I really fail to see why they have dropped this ball. They charge $25 / month ... $15 or $20 if you have a coupon code. We can pretty much determine from Vultr that a cost for this is no more than $5 ... that's $10-$20 / month margin for each PBX for as long as they carry them. Someone should pick up their business model and actually provide the proper service ... sooner or later, someone will.
 

wardmundy

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I'm not quite sure what happened to the RentPBX that many of us knew and loved. They had a gold mine for a number of years. They had a very good product and actually contributed money and technical help to the PIAF development team on our open source projects for many years. But their business model was all based upon squeezing a lot of users out of a single server and it required 32-bit apps. They simply refused to change that business model, and they became irritated with me when we started exploring other options such as Digital Ocean and Vultr and CloudAtCost. Then along came the $1/month cloud platforms, and they stopped speaking to us entirely. I guess from their vantage point it looked like I had destroyed their lucrative business. But the reality was that the marketplace and competition destroyed their business model. Just ask Sears and J.C. Penney how well it works to refuse to keep up with the times. Pretty sad situation unfortunately.
 

krzykat

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I"m not even entirely sure that this is the case. HOwever, without looking at their books, we may never know. I was a client of theirs for many years as well. The bottom line is that I think there IS space in the market for someone that gets a PBX completely spun up for them, and then the keys are handed off to them. Some people like to build their car from scratch, others want to buy one and drive away, while others will want to customize the heck out of it. I think there were people willing to go down that road, but .., apparently they just didn't see it that way. Oh well
 

phinphan

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Our system has been running flawlessly for the last 6 or 7 years but this makes me wonder if I should move to another platform and upgrade. Will give the new one a try. They have made a lot of money (relatively speaking) from me for the last 7 years and I dont think I used more than 5 minutes of their customer service over the years. It has just worked. On the other hand, when customer service gets neglected, service usually follows.
 

billsimon

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Sorry, by "FreePBX open source," I meant "IncrediblePBX 15-16" and add your own enchiladas.

2486
 

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