FOOD FOR THOUGHT Freeswitch & The Bunny

[therock112]

is this one of the reason why asterisk code gets drastically changed with ever release they put out.....!!

http://www.freeswitch.org/node/117

 

[mat.phillips]

Very interesting article; interesting enough for me to have a look at the product anyway.

I got it installed and running with little difficulty but failed at the gui installation. I remember the first time I installed Asterisk and FreePBX from sources and that took a long time to get running, so at first blush, both products have the same steep initial learning curve.

Which is why distro's such as PiaF exist of course; so I'm downloading the unfortunately named trixswitch and I'll have a look at that.

I've no idea if it will replace asterisk for me, but nothing but good can come from the process or investigation and experimentation, right?

 

[wardmundy]

Please keep us posted.

 

[klight]

As I was reading the "Dinosaur" post and resulting fall-out all I could think about was why isn't there a better solution. Then, when reading the "Why Freeswitch" post it became clear that perhaps the better solution was about to be hatched.

Unfortunately Freeswitch doesn't have the surrounding support scripts and guru's to make it a no-brainer alternative, yet...

Perhaps the effort to make the transition from Asterisk 1.4 to 1.6 could be put into making the tools to transition from Asterisk to Freeswitch instead? If it came from a community where the characters all cared about doing the right thing and the outcome just worked, it would surely send the message that this solution is "better".

PIAF did exactly what I needed without too much tinkering under the hood (thanks guys for that!). I think it would be great to see a similar setup done with Freeswitch.

Perhaps with the next official release of Freeswitch around the corner, a Nerd Vittles post giving the details of a simple setup or something fun easily done would give a great intro into its capabilities. Perhaps it would start a revolution?

 

[jroper]

Not withstanding the "Dinosoaur", PiaF is in a solid stable state to go into production, and indeed already has been.

Id like our energies to go into raising the profile of open source telephony so that we get a fair chance to compete with the proprietary PBX systems out there, and let PiaF stand or fall on it's own merits. If it falls. we'll make it better.

That should be our primary focus, rather than looking at other products to test.

1.4 is going to be good for a few years to come, and we'll be ready for 1.6, due to Tom's efforts.

Joe

 

[phoneguy]

Here is a link I came across on a ISO for Free switch a few months ago. I think Andrew Gillis is helping to get the trixswitch project off the ground.

www.trixswitch.org

 

[TheShniz]

...call me paranoid, but I think I'm done with anything that has 'trix' in the title.

 

[edisoninfo]

trix are for kids....

 

[mat.phillips]

Well I downloaded the trixswitch iso and installed it in a VM. The install was ok but the resulting product is a mess.

The server boots up fine, but there's no welcome message when you log into the console; call me fussy, but a customised linux distro like this should say hello when you login at the console.

So I log in and see what IP address it's picked up and key that into a browser, a simple page is displayed with three links, one of which is for the GUI, so I click that and get a page cannot be displayed error, like the webserver for the gui is not running. I spent a few minutes trying to work it out and gave up.

The freeswitch project sounds great, but without an easy way for people to get it on a server and connect a softphone to it, it's going to be very hard to grow momentum.

The wiki article on installing the gui is a nightmare and that's a real shame. I know that the important part is the engine, and the gui is for lazy people, but I'm not about to learn an entire new language to evaluate the product; I want an easy way in and if it's all good then maybe I'll spend a chunk of time studying the command line.

So in short, Asterisk has nothing to worry about for the time being, Freeswitch may make a big noise at some point in the future, but they need to release a decent VMware image of a preconfigured server to get the attention of lots of people.

 

[mystere]

I agree that it needs a lot of work. One problem it has is that there is currently no G729 codec for it, just passthough.

I think Freeswitch has the potential to be a good product. It's less monolithic than Asterisk, and gives a lot of good building blocks. It's not specifically a PBX, but it can be used as one with the right parts.

I'm keeping an eye on it, but it will likely be a while yet before it's ready for primetime as a PBX (I hear it works very well as a backend voip switch).

 

[therock112]

Freeswitch definitely seems interesting....whether its ready for load click and install is a whole other matter.....the fact that Freeswitch and the likes exist is a good thing for the soft pbx industry overall.

if Digium could rethink their development stategy and perhaps "slowdown" and make the existing product top notch where it can compete head to head with proprietary pbx's out there.....it would do a lot of good overall. creating a new branch and repeatedly deprecating their old syntax isnt a smart way to progress imho.

 

[wardmundy]

FreeSwitch has been officially released. We hope some of you will give it a careful look and report back. It might not be that difficult to port most of PBX in a Flash over to that platform IF there was interest. Performance improvements in FreeSwitch (compared to Asterisk) are reported to be in the 1000% range.

How does FreeSwitch compare to Asterisk? Read this article.

Here's a link for a Quick & Dirty Install on an existing PBX in a Flash box (that you don't really depend on to do real work!!!). Be sure to do amportal stop before proceeding!

 

[kenn10]

I'll have to play with this. It looks as though they support multiple registrations to a single SIP account for shared extension appearances.

 

[Bart]

I too am playing with this - what a big leap from asterisk as far as configuration is concerned. Although, the default install provides you a working system, it will take some reading/learning to get it to the same level as asterisk does for me now. Some kind of GUI like FreePBX would be needed to make this a popular distro.

I'm actually building from the PiaF 32 bit install as a base system, but I was wondering if anyone can tell me how to install Piaf basics without Asterisk & FreePBX or how to gracefully remove this part of the install?

TIA bart

 

[wardmundy]

We're working to raise a bounty for a FreePBX port to FreeSwitch. You can read all about it (and contribute) in this thread on the trixbox forum... of all places

 

[mystere]

At this point, i'm more concerned about the lack of G729 codecs (commercial or otherwise)

 

[kenn10]

Anything Moving with FreeSwitch?

Just thought I'd bump this back up. I don't see a lot of activity on the FreeSwitch site and wondered if Ward or Tom have had any conversations with the primaries there regarding additional development and gui?

There are bounties posted but I've seen no comment since then.

 

[mystere]

I've been playing around with FreeSwitch a lot in the last week. I like it a lot. The devs are pretty active on the IRC channel and easy to talk to. I know they're working on the 1.0.1 release right now.

Much like Asterisk, FreeSwitch is just the backend. There is no GUI, and won't be (AFAIK). Any gui will have to be built by a distro (like Trixbox, AsteriskNow, etc..).

I don't know of any GUI right now, but honestly unless you've got a very complex setup, their XML dialplans are very easy to understand and setup, and if you need more flexibility you can use a scripting language like JavaScript or LUA.

There is a learning curve, just like there was with Asterisk, but I think it's worth it.

 

[merlyn]

I don't know of any GUI right now,

Mystere try this website out.

http://www.wikipbx.org/wikipbx?cat=home

I have not tried it yet but the fact that it even exists is a great thing.

Merlyn

 

[wardmundy]

June and July are traditionally "slow months" in this business. Once summer winds down, I think interest will pick up. We're putting the finishing touches on a new CentOS 5.2 distribution so there's hasn't been a lot of spare time.