Migrate from AsteriskNOW to PiaF

[parker]

I have an installation that installed Asterisk NOW 1.5. It's Asterisk 1.4.24 on CentOS 5.3 with FreePBX online-updated to 2.5.1.5. The trunks are all DAHDI with digium cards/clones. The phones are all cisco 7960's with SIP. The AsteriskNOW installation started out with some simple (but annoying) bugs, but either I fixed them, and/or FreePBX updates seemed to have fixed some.

I'm much happier with my PiaF installs (1.4), and would like to migrate this installation to PiaF 1.4 (or 1.5beta??). Other than PiaF having a much better community and my being more familiar with it, some of the DAHDI stuff is substantially less well documented (and suffers from strange bugs, e.g. FOP doesn't work for DAHDI trunks), so going "back" to zaptel sounds like a good idea. Is a plain FreePBX backup from the AsteriskNOW system, followed by a wipe/install of PiaF, followed by a FreePBX restore a generally safe method? (I would, of course, first online-update the FreePBX's with all modules to the latest versions.) Does the fact the PiaFs Asterisk 1.4.21.2/zaptel rather than AsteriskNow's 1.4.24/dahdi preclude this? Any other words of wisdom? I've started to make some customizations (some custom functions, applications, etc.) so I want to migrate before the delta becomes even greater.

Thanks for any suggestions or caveats.

 

[jroper]

Hi

The method you describe should be fine.

The only issues (minor) are the Dahdi / Zaptel move.

FreePBX uses Dahdi trunks by a setting in /etc/amportal.conf called something like DAHDICOMPAT=YES - which does the conversion. Just change it to no.

The dahdi conf files can be ignored in /etc/asterisk as nothing will be refering to them.

You should practice the migration on a spare box or vmware.

Joe

 

[parker]

Thanks! I hope it all goes smoothly. The DAHDI stuff in AsteriskNOW 1.5 has a distinctly "beta" lack of quality to it -- I keep discovering strange-ish little bugs in it...

Oh -- how about recordings in /var/spool/asterisk/monitor (in/out call recording) and custom recordings in /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom? Are they a part of the backup? If not, can I just move them, or are they part of FreePBX's database index?

 

[jroper]

I think you may have to upload them through the GUI, but I could be wrong.

The easiest thing to do is spin up a VMWare virtual install and test the procedure.

Joe