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!

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This Friday we are goint to have our first bug squash party. Elastix developers would be present in the Elastix Developer(#elastix-dev) channel in the freenode network. The objective of this bug squash party is to resolve bugs in both Elastix 2.0 and 1.6.x Everyone is invited: beta-testers, developers and users!

Date: Friday June 25, 2010
Time: 10:00 – 17:00 GMT -5 (15:00 – 21:00 GMT 0)
IRC Channel: #elastix-dev
Network: irc.freenode.net

It’s happened to everybody at some time or another, you wish you could go back to yesterdays system. You make a change and delete some IVR menu you shouldn’t have but can’t remember how it was setup so you can’t recreate it.

The built-in Elastix Backups is great, but only if you remember to do it. I have the memory of a sieve so unfortunately I rarely remember.

The good thing is it’s now no longer difficult for you to backup a system automatically!

Because I don’t do any faxing or the likes on my systems, it doesn’t get backed up. This also won’t backup FOP2, your amportal.conf and other such things.

Here’s what it will do:

• All core Asterisk files in /etc/asterisk
• Custom sound files used in voicemails / recordings
• Voicemail boxes
• CDR records
• FreePBX custom system files
• Differential backups from the previous day, so you’re not wasting storage space and transferring large volumes of data regularly.

It’s enough for you to basically take a stock Elastix system and be back up and running in seconds.

Scenario: Your HDD died. You didn’t have any monitoring in place and so the SMART warnings went undetected. Your system is now down. Thankfully you have the ISO of Elastix, so you quickly throw it into the machine and reinstall (Or if you’re like me, you have a “vanilla” system ready on another HDD).  It boots the brand new Elastix installation and you’re now in a position to restore from your backups.
You now restore from your backups by simply copying everything in your last daily backup to your / folder, and it overwrites everything it needs to. You quickly reimport the .sql file into MySQL and you’re back, with minimal disruption.

1. The script
2. The prep work
3. Adding it to your crontab (So it works automatically of course)
4. Testing
5. Password-less logins
6. More testing = Success!
7. Restoring

Here’s how you do it:

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Formerly SnapANumber, ADA is now offered by Digium. However, the first thing that you’ll notice is that it was written for their Asterisk Business Edition.

That’s great if you have ABE, but not so good if you’re one of the millions of installs out there that uses vanilla Asterisk.

This guide presumes you already have ADA downloaded and installed. If not, you can get the latest (At the time of writing) version 1.1 from here:

http://dl1.digium.com/ADA1.1/ADAInstall.exe

Now you’re going to ignore any instructions you’re previously read, and we’ll start from scratch. Don’t worry, you’ll be up and running in a matter of moments!

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For any business migrating to SIP, the Patton SN4554 is a brilliant way to bring two ISDN lines (4-channels) in to their new PBX system, especially considering you don’t have to break open your PBX Server to install a PCI card.

This basic How-To shows you how to set it up to work with your Elastix system:
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Two blog posts in 24 hours? We’re on a roll here!
Based off PIAF’s Hotel Management System, we’re going to make some minor adjustments to have this work with Elastix. This is a brilliant Hotel Room Management system with the ability to restrict the calls from Ext’s when they are not checked in, per-second billing, and more!

Contents:

1. Installing the base system
2. Updating the config
3. Fixing up HTTPS
4. Updating dial-plan
5. Closing words

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Imagine a client of yours happens to move their PBX, perhaps they are shifting premises (Without notifying you — Their prerogative I suppose). Now, with the change of ISP’s they’ve changed router and network settings, new public IP Address etc, so until you fix the sip_nat.conf settings calls are dead quiet. What do you do?

Well, you could ring them up and get them to port-forward their router and let you in. Or, you can do everything yourself via your shiny remote-control VPN!

Not only does it not matter where your customer plugs in the box, provided DHCP gives it an IP Address and they don’t have some silly proxy in the way, it will tunnel out NAT, past their routers firewalls, and let you in! It’s a service-operators dream! Used in conjunction with the SSH Tunnelling blog article, you’ll find this gives you total control of their local endpoints as well, just as if you were right there sitting on their LAN. You can even access your clients ADSL Router WebGUI and make the required port-forward changes yourself, provided they give you the admin password of course.

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Hi people, this is my first appearence at this blog, by way of a small introduction  my name is Juan Pablo Bustos and I’m writing from Mendoza – Argentina, I’m a Systems Analyst and also I have my ECT Certification.

I’ve been talking with Rafael about publishing this method, and he suggested to share it in the Elastix Blog, so that’s why I’ve have published it, so we can polish it and see a way to implement it on a larger scale.

The objective of this implementation is to use Elastix’s dialer to call a list of customers to deliver a message and to be able to still use the Call Center with “real” agents. I have also added a little PHP script that logs the customer’s answer (number dialed) after the call is completed.

To get this to work, we need to create:

- Some “virtual agents” that are created in the same way as the “real” agents in the  Call Center’s GUI.

- A Custom Context to log them in with the command AgentCallbackLogin (sadly deprecated in Asterisk 1.6 , but able to be worked around).

- Another Custom Context to log them (for debugging purposes, but useful sometimes).

- A Custom Context to redirect the calls to a final custom context that will handle the calls. (more…)

It’s sometimes interesting to be able to install a small server Elastix on a device that is not expensive.

It is also well known that Asterisk does not need huge CPU power to function properly, with minimal requirements for RAM, and the hard disk size (few gigabytes is enough).

I personally had the chance to get their hands on a superb offer from the incumbent. No less than 101 € for this little Netbook. With my current server running on the same basis, I told myself: “Why not put this on Elastix netbook?!”

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In this post we are going to share some useful video tutorials uploaded to Youtube by  Scott Wittenberg.  These and other videos can be accessed in the Elastix Youtube Channel.

In this article you can watch the following videos:

• How to setup a basic Extension in Elastix
• How to setup a basic outgoing trunk in Elastix
• How to setup Follow Me in Elastix
• How to Setup A Basic DID (Telephone Number) Using Elastix
• How to setup a basic IVR (Automated Attendant) in Elastix

How to setup a basic Extension in Elastix

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