Yes it’s surprisingly easy, and yes you too can have it today!

This is still very much a work-in-progress, as we’re merging two unfinished products and I’ve not had enough of a chance to test it thoroughly either so I’m hoping for some response from the community on this one. I think this is quite possibly the first time that FreePBXv3 has been tied into a major distro, and I reckon it’d be cool to see Elastix-2.0 support FreePBXv3 officially.

I have however tested Ext’s registering happily, calling each other, so I know that FreePBXv3 is tied in correctly.

Anyway, I’ve tar’d up a slightly older version of FreePBXv3, as they’re undergoing some design changes right at the moment which mean that the current version doesn’t install. So, we’ll be using this.

Total installation should only take about 5 minutes, so this How-To will be nice and short!

So what you’re going to do is start by installing the latest Elastix-2.0 RC3. In my case I used i386.

Once it’s installed, ssh into the server and run:

cd /var/www/html
wget http://c2s.co.nz/dumpfiles/freepbxv3.tar.bz2
tar xvjf freepbxv3.tar.bz2
cd freepbxv3
sh preinstall.sh

It’s 8.5MB, and this is the snapshot of FreePBXv3 that we’re going to be using.

I’ve already modified the preinstall.sh so it uses the user “asterisk” instead of “nobody”, keeping in line with how Elastix does things.

You’re going to then run the following commands to upgrade PHP:

yum install yum-priorities
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/CentOS-Testing.repo
yum --enablerepo=c5-testing install php
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

We need PHP-5.2 because of one of the FreePBX dependencies (Kohana) and Elastix only comes with PHP-5.1

Now you need to fire up the Elastix WebUI, but instead of just going to the regular URL, add in /freepbxv3/ to the end and you should be greeted with the install window:

Agree, hit Next.

You will be prompted with a pre-flight checklist. It should pass the lot. Again, hit Next.

Now, on the next screen, you’re going to see the database details.

Set the database to freepbxv3, the username to “root” and put in the default Elastix root MySQL password: eLaStIx.2oo7

You might also want to adjust your timezone.

Now, create a Username and a Password that you will use to access the system. Whatever you enter in here will be the email address used to log you in, it’ll create the account based off this, so remember the address / password you use. Don’t worry, this account is unique to your Elastix / FreePBXv3 installation.

On the next screen you need to change it from the FreeSWITCH driver to the Asterisk driver. All the other defaults are fine except the AMI admin password which needs to be changed to “elastix456″

The next screen will complain a little about a few bits n pieces relating to Media Management. We’re going to ignore this for now simply because I’m lazy. Scroll right the way down and hit “Next”, as the default selections suit us fine.

It will then go through and do the installation of everything:

When that’s done you’ll be taken to your newly installed FreePBXv3 system!

One thing I’ve found is that the default passwords didn’t seem to work until I modified the password on the accounts. You can do this under Destinations –> Devices

Select Device 1 and choose Edit. Adjust the password and then hit Save.

You should now be able to take a phone and register it using the Username “sip1″.

I then did the same for Device 2, registered with “sip2″ after changing the password, and was able to make calls freely between them.

Granted there’s a lot more to be tested, but that should be enough to get you pointed in the right direction. I’d love to hear from some people how they get on with this, and the blog will be updated in-future.

This has also been cross-posted at http://www.c2s.co.nz/blog/?p=380