I have not found the phone provisioning in FreePBX/TrixBox to be all that great ... Its better than nothing which is what we have in Astlinux right now, but it aint all that slick either ... I seem to recall that they did a pretty nice job of supporting Cisco phones out of the gate but that was it ... But at least they have a mechanism to permit the administrator to push config files up to the server and to edit text config files ... That is significant and is kind of what I hope we can get to with Astlinux ...
Now these guys do phone provisioning well ... There is an Asterisk implementation done by an outfit called Selintra in Britain that is called Sail ... It is designed to run on the SME v7.x Linux distribution ... These guys have gone all out when it comes to phone provisioning ... They have a very slick template system that a smarter than average Admin can edit to add his/her phone brands into but it comes with templates for many of the most popular built in ... This is about the slickest job of handling phone provisioning I have seen in an Asterisk package ... Far superior to what FreePBX does now ... But alas, Selintra/Sail requires a pretty much conventional Linux server to run on ... I think it requires PERL, Apache and MySQL very similar to FreePBX ... So there is no way to get it to run on appliance type hardware ... The minimum system requirements are just way beyond what you are going to find in your typical small form factor no moving parts type system ... What do we need in Astlinux ... If we had a provisioning system in Astlinux that was as slick as what is in Selintra/Sail, that would be a dream come true IMHO ... But I would be quite happy with something much simpler and easier to implement/maintain if that turned out to be the direction the developers decided to go ... I would be very pleased if they used the FreePBX model and just gave us a reliable way to upload our config files to the proper locations on the server and easily navigate to and edit the text based config files ... The templating system is slick, but would require someone to devote a lot of effort to keeping it up to date and current ... I am not sure that manpower is available to this project ... I hope that anyone taking up the challenge to work on phone provisioning in Astlinux will give a hard look at what TrixBox and Selintra/Sail are doing ... While neither of these system would easily transfer directly to Astlinux due to dependencies, they are addressing the problem in very creative ways ... G.Hendershot -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of canuck15 Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 12:17 PM To: 'Discussion of AstLinux - Asterisk on Compact Flash' Subject: Re: [Astlinux-users] Phone provisioning Got any better suggestions? Until I find something else that is better (and free) I am stuck with FreePBX. It does everything I could ever possibly want it to do. If someone thinks it is not flexible enough to support most if not all custom configurations they probably don't know how to use it properly. Configuring from scratch may be good for personal satisfaction, ego or whatever but not very practical for a lot of people, businesses, and applications. I am not disagreeing that the requirement for MySQL, Perl, and Apache are overkill for many installations. It does work quite well for more complicated setups and again, there is nothing else out there that is free and even comes close to it's sophistication and ease of use. -----Original Message----- From: IPC Solutions [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2006 3:09 PM To: Discussion of AstLinux - Asterisk on Compact Flash Subject: Re: [Astlinux-users] Phone provisioning Thanks FreePBX for forcing me to learn how to configure Asterisk from scratch. HORRIBLE is the word. Totally agree. Michael Knill -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Kristian Kielhofner Sent: Friday, 20 October 2006 6:25 AM To: Discussion of AstLinux - Asterisk on Compact Flash Subject: Re: [Astlinux-users] Phone provisioning Paul Davidson wrote: > > I agree- plists would be a nice match. My concern, especially in the > case of something like astlinux, but in general, is the use of scripts > to 'bring older configs up to date'. I don't wanna- I want the > system to use what's there, let me make arbitrary changes directly to > the configuration files, and still be able to deal with it. I know, > it's a picky, lofty goal- perhaps even impossible. But I look at it > as- I can represent the same dialplan 10 different ways or more, and > Asterisk interprets it correctly, every time- so why can't a > configuration tool? > I see it as a perfect fit for astlinux, as it's use is more aimed at > small environments, with beginning administrators, or no administrator > at all. Someone who installs asterisk in an environment like that > needs a simple interface, but may grow into more advanced > development- and the last thing I would recommend to them is to lock > themselves in to a particular configuration tool, or style. > > I will keep my eye on it, and I'll also burn some brain power as to > how I might get my evil, er, stated goals accomplished. At some > point, I may put together a collection of some of the more bizarre > Asterisk configs, so I can feed them into a parser and see what jumps out. > > -pbd > pbd, I like your style. FreePBX (or whatever they are calling that GUI) has some major problems that keep it out of AstLinux: 1) HUGE software dependencies. Why do you need MySQL, perl, etc, etc for a simple web interface? 2) Inflexibility. They also force a given style of configuration on you. If you are not able to accomplish your Asterisk goals within that framework, too bad. You're out of luck and you're back to editing config files by hand. Unfortunately, now you are editing HORRIBLE config files that are so abstracted you're better off starting from scratch... I really like how you are approaching this. Let me know if you need anything, anything at all. -- Kristian Kielhofner _______________________________________________ Astlinux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.kriscompanies.com/mailman/listinfo/astlinux-users Donations to support AstLinux are graciously accepted via PayPal to [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Astlinux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.kriscompanies.com/mailman/listinfo/astlinux-users Donations to support AstLinux are graciously accepted via PayPal to [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Astlinux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.kriscompanies.com/mailman/listinfo/astlinux-users Donations to support AstLinux are graciously accepted via PayPal to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
