Exploring VitalPBX
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@andrewbyrd70 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
OR I could just stick with what has worked for the past 5 years - FREEPBX. I am all about ease of setup and use.
It Vitalpbx wants me to change multiple settings and dance on one foot to get their product to work I don't need it. I can fire up a Freepbx server right now and have it working and ready to go in half an hour or less.
The only reason I explored Vitalpbx is for a client for multi-tenant.I do thank you for the suggestions, criticisms and insights though. You gave this to me freely and I do appreciate that - I really do.
If you think FreePBX was easy the first time, then you have rose colored glasses on. take them off.
FreePBX is certainly not simple or straight forward to get right for a beginner.
Honestly, IMO, VitalPBX and FreePBX are about the same in that regard. The VitalPBX GUI is tons more friendly, but the settings and options are the same in both systems.
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That said, I'm not a multi-tenant guy, I'm a single tenant engineer these days. So maybe Vital does something great there, but building multi-tenant on Asterisk seems like a nightmare.
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@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@andrewbyrd70 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
The only reason I explored Vitalpbx is for a client for multi-tenant.
While they support that, I'm not sure that it looks very interesting. FusionPBX is way more interesting for that kind of functionality, IMHO.
Correct. I would never recommend any thing base don Asterisk for a multi-tenant deployment. It was never not designed for it.
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@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
That said, I'm not a multi-tenant guy, I'm a single tenant engineer these days. So maybe Vital does something great there, but building multi-tenant on Asterisk seems like a nightmare.
It is all prefixing. Nothing special, but crazy to maintain.
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I agree that Fusionpbx is a better multi-tenant solution. I have a server with Vultr running Fusionpbx and has for over 6 months with very little issues. It went into production 3 months ago and has been a great solution for 3 of my clients. Just my 2 cents. . . .
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Closed source is my #1 complaint about VitalPBX.
This is why:
I absolutely use custom contexts on almost all systems. Typically only one or two simple things. But they are things that make Asterisk so much more friendly IMO.
Asterisk is open source, and the structure of adding custom dialplan into contexts is freely available. But VitalPBX locks this out by not having a way to include custom contexts by default.
Examples of some I use with this
pjsip send notify:
Reload, but do not reboot a Yealink Phone:[reload-yealink] Event=>check-sync\;reboot=falseForce reboot a Yealink Phone
[restart-yealink] Event=>check-sync\;reboot=trueSend a command to a Yealink phone to turn on DND
[dndon-yealink] Content-Type=>message/sipfrag Event=>ACTION-URI Content=>key=DNDOnSend a command to a Yealink phone to turn off DND
[dndoff-yealink] Content-Type=>message/sipfrag Event=>ACTION-URI Content=>key=DNDOffSend a command to a Yealink phone to factory reset it
[default-yealink] Content-Type=>message/sipfrag Event=>ACTION-URI Content=>key=ResetThat does not even get into simple basic custom dialplan for actual call routing things.
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That last one works awesome when you have DHCP options setup to point a phone when it boots.
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@JaredBusch
Off topic, but I haven't seen those 1-2-3 options on our T42 phones.
What is that? Is it to switch banks of BLF buttons or something like that?
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@Pete-S said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@JaredBusch
Off topic, but I haven't seen those 1-2-3 options on our T42 phones.
What is that? Is it to switch banks of BLF buttons or something like that?
Yes. The T42G has 6 physical buttons, but you can program up to 15 DSS keys on those 6 buttons.
If you use more than 1-6, button 6 becomes 1 - 2 or 1 -2 - 3 depending on which ones you have setup.
In this case I have buttons DSS keys 1as a line button, 2 as a BLF to my extension, and 14 and 15 set as line buttons, nothing else on any DSS key.
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@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@Pete-S said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@JaredBusch
Off topic, but I haven't seen those 1-2-3 options on our T42 phones.
What is that? Is it to switch banks of BLF buttons or something like that?
Yes. The T42G has 6 physical buttons, but you can program up to 15 DSS keys on those 6 buttons.
If you use more than 1-6, button 6 becomes 1 - 2 or 1 -2 - 3 depending on which ones you have setup.
In this case I have buttons DSS keys 1as a line button, 2 as a BLF to my extension, and 14 and 15 set as line buttons, nothing else on any DSS key.
OK, so it's automatically handled by the phones firmware then.
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@andrewbyrd70 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
OR I could just stick with what has worked for the past 5 years - FREEPBX. I am all about ease of setup and use.
It Vitalpbx wants me to change multiple settings and dance on one foot to get their product to work I don't need it. I can fire up a Freepbx server right now and have it working and ready to go in half an hour or less.
The only reason I explored Vitalpbx is for a client for multi-tenant.I do thank you for the suggestions, criticisms and insights though. You gave this to me freely and I do appreciate that - I really do.
So, I spun up VitalPBX again (so easy, this part I love).
Made a PJSIP extension, looky look. It is showing the internal IP. So of course the PBX cannot send a call back to it.Had you done what I asked, we probably would see this. This is a configuration on your part in the PBX.
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@JaredBusch Something has changed. On previous versions of vitalpbx you could spin it up and instantly connect without showing the internal IP. In the most current version 2.3.6 something change to where something has to be adjusted. Where would I go in vitalpbx to fix this?
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I changed the default PJSIP profile to this and it now registers correctly.
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I neglected to get a before screenshot.. let me nuke and reinstall.
Edit Here:
Before changes:
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@andrewbyrd70 Don't know. I don't think so. I have spun this up a few times now and I am pretty sure I have changed that each time. But you could entirely be right. I didn't document anything because I didn't keep the systems.
I just added the ext 1001 again to this new instance and registered just fine and showing the proper AOR.
Note: using the default generated password, which contains special characters.
I do recommend against that (but only because scripting errors and readability) I like to use random MD5 hashes for passwords because they are longer.
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@JaredBusch what I am fascinated by is you in a matter of minutes were able to find the issue and resolve the issue. Their own tech support guy after receiving more information from me than you did never ever suggested that. He suggested password changes with no special characters. He suggested things that have absolutely nothing to do with the problem. Again my confidence level and their support is very low at this moment. maybe you need to be my tech support guy? Thank you so much for investing your time in this.
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@andrewbyrd70 I did know that by enabling RTP symmetric that fixes a one-way audio issue. I have figured that one out last year. But I never knew to enable rewrite contact. I think in previous versions it came enabled by default and that's why this confused me this go around. Thank you again
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@andrewbyrd70 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
what I am fascinated by is you in a matter of minutes were able to find the issue and resolve the issue. Their own tech support guy after receiving more information from me than you did never ever suggested that.
Like I said... @JaredBusch @Romo and I all do this stuff for a living. We do that because companies call us instead of the vendors. We do end to end support, rather than viewing the world from a single product or vendor perspective. Support at places like VitalPBX tend to be developers, not IT. But problems with PBXs is normally IT side (configuration or integration) rather than with code. So the vendors themselves are rarely the best suited to provide support. They are ideal if the issue happens to be bad coding, but that's rarely the case.
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@andrewbyrd70 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
Again my confidence level and their support is very low at this moment.
Almost twenty years in VoIP / PBX support and never have I used the vendor for support
It's great when the vendor can help, but I never end up using them or seeing them as a critical part of the support chain.Not sure if I'm old school or from some different culture but coming from a system admin background in the 1990s, I never was aware of the "call the vendor for support" concept until getting involved on
and finding out that lots of people call the vendors when things didn't work. I had easily been in the industry for fifteen years before even realizing that that was an actual option in many cases. Great that it exists, but never where I think to look first.For VitalPBX, or FreePBX for that matter, as long as they can make the product and keep the code clean, I don't care if they even offer support, let alone are good at it. That's now where my support will come from, nor what I would pay for.
Same with an OS or a database.
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