iasm3j59s
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- Oct 28, 2021
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I just upgraded (re-deployed) a system from 2015 (from 2007) to the latest greatest PIAF, oops I mean Incredible PBX, and I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate Ward Mundy and the amazing crew of people involved over the years for their continued energy, enthusiasm, staying power, innovation and contributions to voip.
I vaguely recall stumbling on something called asterisk@home many years ago (2005 iirc) when a friend asked me to help them set up phones in a new office for the small business they were started. They'd been horrified by the telco quotes and, knowing I dabbled in computers, asked if it was possible for me to assemble something. By the time I was assembling the system, Trixbox was released and I used that on a couple of similar systems. Looking back through old emails, I see that blogs at mundy.org were referenced regularly as I worked through this. The advice on providers and reviews of the various Asterisk wrappers were invaluable. E.g. see this one, which, amazingly, still redirects correctly all these years later: http://mundy.org/blog/index.php?p=71 (few web site maintainers bother to do this sort of link fixup, thanks!).
By the time those systems were ready for a refresh (by then: a non-profit, and 2 small business), what I recall being called "PBX In A Flash" was available, and it added shell scripts, preconfigured many settings and pre-installed many plugins. I updated my mini-PC 1U rack voip boxes to use that and was very happy with the results.
By 2015, that original hardware (complete with Sangoma PSTN cards for on-premises handling of POTS lines) was tired, and fast cable internet was more readily available. It made sense to port the 1-2 "hard lines" to one of the (by then) many voip providers and to move the hosting to the cloud. Based on the PIAF recommendations, I went with vultr and that system survived pretty well in a non-profit with two physical locations and 20 to 30 extensions (a mixture of original Grandstream, later Polycom, still later "various" phones) until a few months ago.
By late 2020, that 2015 system became increasingly unreliable (e.g. ring groups were misbehaving when a phone became unregistered, inbound DIDs frequently becoming unregistered) but with COVID-19 moving staff remote, people survived with cell phones until now. I decided a few days ago to again re-deploy with the latest-greatest "Incredible PBX 2021", again on Vultr. Despite not really having touched voip since the last install, and only having 1 system to babysit during that time, this install was the easiest by far. I used the Vultr Marketplace version for a one-click install, and then followed the 8 or so command line steps to poke firewall holes, set the domain name etc. To make email happy I had to mess with the hostname by hand (which may yet come to bite me), and there was the fun of copy-pasting all the extensions from the previous install to the new, but essentially most things "just worked". (Side note: copy-paste in a browser window is SO much easier than an in-place re-deploy on the same hardware, where lots of planning is needed to make a note of settings etc., and once it is erased then they're gone!)
A fun extra was adding voicemail transcription in about 30 mins (including the Watson sign-up). This non-profit uses voicemail a lot, listening to the attachments sent in email. So when I saw a reference to this feature, I figured I'd give it a go. I couldn't believe how easy it was! (Though, side note 2, the we-dont-have-tech-support.wav file was missing, so I had to improvise with another file and edit the test script). Early feedback is that they *love* this feature.
Looking back, I realise Ward was a part of every step of this voip journey. Few individuals have the stamina to follow something through like that, and to keep it focused on low-cost, open access to the benefit of all. We've never corresponded directly, but many thanks to you Ward, as well as the doubtless many less-visible helpers.
Cheers
I vaguely recall stumbling on something called asterisk@home many years ago (2005 iirc) when a friend asked me to help them set up phones in a new office for the small business they were started. They'd been horrified by the telco quotes and, knowing I dabbled in computers, asked if it was possible for me to assemble something. By the time I was assembling the system, Trixbox was released and I used that on a couple of similar systems. Looking back through old emails, I see that blogs at mundy.org were referenced regularly as I worked through this. The advice on providers and reviews of the various Asterisk wrappers were invaluable. E.g. see this one, which, amazingly, still redirects correctly all these years later: http://mundy.org/blog/index.php?p=71 (few web site maintainers bother to do this sort of link fixup, thanks!).
By the time those systems were ready for a refresh (by then: a non-profit, and 2 small business), what I recall being called "PBX In A Flash" was available, and it added shell scripts, preconfigured many settings and pre-installed many plugins. I updated my mini-PC 1U rack voip boxes to use that and was very happy with the results.
By 2015, that original hardware (complete with Sangoma PSTN cards for on-premises handling of POTS lines) was tired, and fast cable internet was more readily available. It made sense to port the 1-2 "hard lines" to one of the (by then) many voip providers and to move the hosting to the cloud. Based on the PIAF recommendations, I went with vultr and that system survived pretty well in a non-profit with two physical locations and 20 to 30 extensions (a mixture of original Grandstream, later Polycom, still later "various" phones) until a few months ago.
By late 2020, that 2015 system became increasingly unreliable (e.g. ring groups were misbehaving when a phone became unregistered, inbound DIDs frequently becoming unregistered) but with COVID-19 moving staff remote, people survived with cell phones until now. I decided a few days ago to again re-deploy with the latest-greatest "Incredible PBX 2021", again on Vultr. Despite not really having touched voip since the last install, and only having 1 system to babysit during that time, this install was the easiest by far. I used the Vultr Marketplace version for a one-click install, and then followed the 8 or so command line steps to poke firewall holes, set the domain name etc. To make email happy I had to mess with the hostname by hand (which may yet come to bite me), and there was the fun of copy-pasting all the extensions from the previous install to the new, but essentially most things "just worked". (Side note: copy-paste in a browser window is SO much easier than an in-place re-deploy on the same hardware, where lots of planning is needed to make a note of settings etc., and once it is erased then they're gone!)
A fun extra was adding voicemail transcription in about 30 mins (including the Watson sign-up). This non-profit uses voicemail a lot, listening to the attachments sent in email. So when I saw a reference to this feature, I figured I'd give it a go. I couldn't believe how easy it was! (Though, side note 2, the we-dont-have-tech-support.wav file was missing, so I had to improvise with another file and edit the test script). Early feedback is that they *love* this feature.
Looking back, I realise Ward was a part of every step of this voip journey. Few individuals have the stamina to follow something through like that, and to keep it focused on low-cost, open access to the benefit of all. We've never corresponded directly, but many thanks to you Ward, as well as the doubtless many less-visible helpers.
Cheers
Phone System 