upgrading from 1.4 with Zaptel?

[Alex728]

How easy is it to do this? Because of a showstopper fault with Asterisk 1.6, DAHDI and UK telephone lines which persisted for a whole year before it was eventually addressed I never have used DADHI on any of our production systems...

but I get the impression that like it or not we are being pushed to upgrade as once 1.4 loses support in April 2012 it will become at increasing risk of security breaches, given the amount of effort being put into hacking phone systems..

this is now a dilemma as I've got 5 working systems in a linked numbering scheme across multiple sites which TBH I'd rather not upgrade unless I really have to but it seems there is no option - especially as they all successfully use OSLEC echo cancelling which in DAHDI is compiled into the Kernel so upgrading would presumably mean reformatting each box and restoring the data/setup once it is back up.

I'm assuming that Zaptel will only work with 1.4.21.1 and below (is this correct?)

Has anyone done a similar upgrade and are there any how tos?

 

[darmock]

Good luck with that!

Yup you are being "forced" to go to 1.8 and then after that 10.X etc.

There is NO clear cut upgrade process between asterisk families that actually works consistently in all cases. A number of people have opined that just read document X and poof easy peasy.

The reality of the matter is you should take advantage of all the new goodies etc by doing scrub and reinstall and putting in the latest 1.8.5.0 (at the moment)

I would recommend a new box be installed with the latest PIAF then keeping the old box up and running bring up both of the freepbx interfaces and copy and paste between the boxes. I have done some complex setups this was and it really does not take a lot of time. There are also some files that you could copy across if they have been heavily customized such as iptables and your callerid blacklist.

Some will say "Oh just use freepbx backup and restore" Unfortunately fpbx 2.8 (which is our default for good reason) has problems with some aspects of restore.

Then you will get some who say just upgrade to 2.9 or 2.10 alpha-beta-gamma whatever on both machines and all will be well. Could be but I don't like the unknown and stress that is associated with it.

I finally replaced my last 1.4 based system in the commercial boxes I administer and I have used my recommendations on all of them. The only down side is you must have a spare computer to accomplish this. For remote sites I have contract with local IT firms that will go in and set up the new box and install vpn. From there everything is done remotely except if there are hardware cards such as T1 or fxo/fxs. I generally transplant them into the new box first prior to dong the new PIAF install.

Generally for my commercial installs I sell them 2 identical boxes one of which is used for a cold backup. Thus the old system gets converted to the cold backup after we are sure the new system works flawlessly.


Hope this helps.


Tom

 

[Alex728]

Thanks for the info - there are a couple of spare machines one of which is set up so it can be used as a backup PABX for any location...

Will 1.8.5.0 talk to older versions via IAX2? (I vaguely recall that some setting about "requirecalltoken=no" has to be changed) -perhaps some other things. that way I could start with my home one (this being less critical) and wouldn't have to do all 5 boxes in one hit.

I did at one point get OSLEC and DAHDI running on a spare box about 2 years ago with a distro that Joe Roper briefly put online but never even got round to plugging that into a phone line due to other work pressures!

there is a really odd issue with a line test signal found in England - in fact as it is it segfaults Asterisk 1.4.21.1 and Zaptel 1.4.12.1 (not Zaptel 1.4.11 though!)

I did report the segfault years ago and it eventually got fixed in a newer Zaptel version then came back . That said as asterisk restarts and the line test normally only happens in the middle of the night and if someone is using the phone the exchange does not send these signals its not such an annoyance..

However when DAHDI came out it locked up the line until the next day when reset, until a patch came out

https://issues.asterisk.org/view.php?id=14163

But (and this was what was keeping me from upgrading) I am not 100% sure what happened in the end, I assume the fix made it into later versions and would be found in 1.8.* but not sure how to intepret some of the stuff on the issues forum.

We've still got the Centrex Service (which is one reason I kept them) and power fail sockets as a backup in case anything goes wildly wrong (these are healthcare facilities so it is safety critical there are reliable telephones at least connected to the outside world) - but I'd rather make this as smooth and seamless as possible to the end users.

 

[blanchae]

There is a lot of B.S. on the Internet about Dahdi. Zaptel is version 1 of the Digium drivers for legacy cards. Dahdi is version 2 and an upgrade. Zaptel is not supported. Dahdi is the latest up to date supported version.

Due to trademark infringement, the name was changed from Zaptel to Dahdi. At the same time, the Linux kernel included Dahdi as part of the kernel. A new (better) configuration process was implemented that basically moved the zaptel configuration files to /etc/dahdi from /etc/asterisk and renamed them.

There is confusion as most people just don't understand the configuration "#include" command and believe that it is a comment statement. "#include" is a directive that tells Asterisk to include the following configuration files on that line. Once you understand how an include works then troubleshooting becomes easier.

There is conflict between FreePBX configurations and Astribank who created zaptelconf and dahdi_conf.

dahdi_conf creates /etc/dahdi/system.conf and /etc/asterisk/dahdi_channels.conf - very useful configurations except with sometimes dummy extensions can cause issues.

FreePBX creates /etc/asterisk/chan_dahdi.conf and its associated include configs: chan_dahdi_group.conf, chan_dahdi_extensions.conf, etc.. This is a much more logical configuration.

The problem is that often chan_dahdi.conf does not include dahdi_channels.conf and important configurations (FXO and PRI trunks) may be missed in a FreePBX configuration.

The FreePBX Dahdi module and the dahdi_channels.conf creator are getting close to working well together but it still takes some fixing to get it to work.

I've been using Dahdi for 3 years now with versions 1.6 and 1.8 without any issues using Digium cards, Sangoma cards and Astribanks.

 

[Alex728]

the confusion with #include and the automatically generated channel file not being included existed on zaptel as well as dahdi.

what has happened this side of the pond is a further separate issue - the zaptel/dadhi change muddies the water a bit but it is a big reason why people in the UK do not want to change...Every few nights between about 19:00 and 07:00, Openreach (the division of British Telecom which still own most of the UK's phone lines) send a special signal from their exchange, which tests lines to ensure they haven't been cut or otherwise damaged.

the signal is seen by the TDM card drivers as a polarity reversal and several battery drops. In the UK, our systems are set up so that a polarity reversal on hook is viewed as a sign that an incoming call is imminent - so an FSK stream of caller ID is to be expected and then ringing voltage.

if no caller ID arrives, what happens next varies between zaptel and Asterisk versions. Sometimes absolutely nothing - the channel times out - sometimes it segfaults and asterisk resets I did report it myself years back and it was fixed for a bit then the segfault reoccured in subsequent versions.

I suspect that as Openreach has been pushing the test further into the small hours and doing it less often (it used to happen every night, now its only every 3 days) that UK users were just living with the segfault as it can go unnoticed unless you happened to be watching consoles or listening for the beep at random hours.

https://issues.asterisk.org/view.php?id=12453

I did consider moving to DAHDI years ago but then this bombshell came about - the hobsons choice of having a segfault, or an entire channel locked up

https://issues.asterisk.org/view.php?id=14163

I have to admit I am still not sure if the fix got applied or which versions onwards and/or whether it automatically gets migrated into 1.8.x (maybe it does, but I am not an expert on these bug tracker things). And it took over a year for the fix to be approved and applied for 14163... so this is why across the pond I am wary to upgrade anything...

 

[ipiera]

Hi Tom,
I'm a long time PiaF user and until this month have stuck with Asterisk 1.4 and the Gold package for my production systems. I am interested to note that you have migrated your 1.4 users so I though it time to built a 1.8.50 purple test system. There have been a few issues with IAX2 incoming calls and Cisco 7960 firmware and config issues which I'll create a new thread.

Which version of Asterisk have you migrated your production boxes to?

Paul