开云体育

At the last meeting I had promised to send out an email about FreePBX. I was expecting to just pass on information about whenever the Philadelphia Linux User Group (Plug) has a talk, but I don’t see it in the schedule yet. It will probably still happen but I don’t know when. At the moment their meetings are online using Jitsi so they are easy to join . There are also Libera Chat IRC channels #plug, #asterisk and #freepbx and youtube videos.

I am nowhere near an expert, but I have got it working. I have spent an enormous amount of time on it but I also found it very rewarding. It is one of the more complicated pieces of software I have used so it is a bit much to discuss for a single email. In this email I will give an overview. Hopefully, I will follow up. I would be happy to answer questions and be corrected. Maybe at some point I would be confident enough that I could give a talk if the meetings are still online.

Asterisk is the actual PBX software. It is probably available as a package for most distros or it can be compiled from source. FreePBX could be thought of as a suite that includes Asterisk, a web interface, fail2ban, OpenVPN, etc. It has both free and commercial modules. Usually you install it as it’s own distro. The normal version is for x86 and is based on CentOS 7.x. There is a Raspberry Pi image based on Raspbian. The x86 one can be registered (paid for) so you can use the Pro features, the Raspberry Pi one cannot – it shouldn’t be used commercially. Some components are also missing for RPi (such as the web interface for the firewall). There is a docker image but there are many reasons you should not install it this way.

The current major version of FreePBX is 15. There is a beta for 16. They had planned to upgrade to CentOS 8 but because of all the drama, they are staying with the old OS. A lot of stuff is very out of date (old OS/kernel, Apache/PHP, etc.) I think it must be difficult considering how many parts there are and what needs to be tested. Unfortunately the Wiki documentation is also often out of date. There is a forum.

Maybe I should have started by explaining what it does. I expect that most people now are actually using VOIP even if their house connection is still POTS. Instead of using a normal telephone provider, you can pay a VOIP provider for a phone number. (I am using voip.ms and I’m very happy with it.) You can even get phone numbers in other countries. The FreePBX software lets you make a connection over the Internet to one or more “trunks” and you can configure “extensions” which are either physical VOIP phones, VOIP to analog adapters or software phones.

I have two Android phones and use the Zoiper App. Each one is an extension. Zoiper is also available for regular computers and I’m sure there are other clients also. I have a US phone number that will ring on my handy mobile phone anywhere I am that has good Internet. My German router (Fritzbox) can talk to the PBX, for the PBX it is a second "trunk". So I can get/make phone calls using either number. The dial rules determine whether to use the German or American phone number when I make a call. I'm running my PBX as a virtual machine on my home server but I plan to get a Lenovo thin client. It is installed on my RPi but I didn't configure it yet. It may be that because of missing modules or excessive writing that it is not practical but I can't say yet either way.

There are a lot of neat things you can do such as video calls, Fax, SMS/MMS, etc. Some of this I have working, some not. And you can program responses such as dialing an extension to get voice mail or the weather.

Best wishes,

Jon Wolfe