Exploring VitalPBX
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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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@andrewbyrd70 what I want from my PBX vendor, whether VitalPBX or FusionPBX or whomever, is a good product that is well developed. As long as they do that, I can or the community can support the product as well or better than a software firm reasonably can. The ability to make software is very disconnected from the ability to support or design solutions around it. Making a PBX is a software engineering endeavour, not an IT one. So they actually end up being odd places to get support because it just isn't their wheelhouse, normally. And if it is, it's a coincidence.
The following thread is a great example of where one of the original devs behind FreePBX came in here and showed some of the greatest ignorance, combined with insane hubris, around IT. Sure, we could write him off as being outside of his field and just a jerk. But the thread is more important in that it shows a lack of understanding what he knows and doesn't know and hubris is dangerous to any field. That he's a complete tool in IT terms is neither here nor there, it is how he approaches learning, research, understanding, and personal growth that are so bad that it makes me really worried about the underpinnings of FreePBX. That someone with so little rational thought, and so little ability to self evaluate, and is aggressive and lost wrote the code is scary: https://mangolassi.it/topic/19657/revisiting-zfs-and-freenas-in-2019/
He is, I believe, the second lowest reputation score in the community's history.
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@scottalanmiller Well, at least he left FreePBX quite a while ago. But yes, just slightly insane in that thread.
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@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller Well, at least he left FreePBX quite a while ago. But yes, just slightly insane in that thread.
Yeah, only a reflection upon the history of FreePBX, nothing to do with their current owner. But it scares me that he touched that code!
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Anyone using VitalPBX in production yet?
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No. I probably won't for a very long time due to the number of bugs. Freepbx has far fewer bugs for me and causes me less stress and headaches
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@Dashrender said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@VoIP_n00b said in Exploring VitalPBX:
Anyone using VitalPBX in production yet?
I think Scott is.
We are indeed.
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@VoIP_n00b said in Exploring VitalPBX:
Anyone using VitalPBX in production yet?
NTG and @CCWTech are both on it in production as MSPs. And we have customers on it, as well.
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@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@VoIP_n00b said in Exploring VitalPBX:
Anyone using VitalPBX in production yet?
NTG and @CCWTech are both on it in production as MSPs. And we have customers on it, as well.
Feedback? Pros? Cons?
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@VoIP_n00b said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@VoIP_n00b said in Exploring VitalPBX:
Anyone using VitalPBX in production yet?
NTG and @CCWTech are both on it in production as MSPs. And we have customers on it, as well.
Feedback? Pros? Cons?
So far we are happy with it. It gets lots of continuous work done, which is a big deal that we are investing in the future and don't feel like we are investing in technical debt. It has some negatives, for sure, like a strong focus on chan_sip which is a long dead tech and little on pjsip which is not just current, but current for many years now. It's definitely a younger product with fewer overall features, but it feels like a lot more momentum and their relatively rare and low cost add ons don't feel like you are being nickle and dimed. We have a few things we tend to buy (like the operator panel) but the price and integration are great and it supports the product directly.
We've run into pretty much no issues with it.
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@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
It's definitely a younger product with fewer overall features,
Yeah, that is not how that works.
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@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
It has some negatives, for sure, like a strong focus on chan_sip which is a long dead tech and little on pjsip which is not just current, but current for many years now.
Do you know if they plan on changing?
@JaredBusch
Are you still heavy using FreePBX or do you use something else? -
@hobbit666 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
It has some negatives, for sure, like a strong focus on chan_sip which is a long dead tech and little on pjsip which is not just current, but current for many years now.
Do you know if they plan on changing?
@JaredBusch
Are you still heavy using FreePBX or do you use something else?I use FreePBX, but if Vital ets their act together on PJSIP, I will look at it more seriously. I still dislike that they lock out custom dial plan. Asterisk is FOSS, that jsut seems rude to not allow without paying for it.
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@hobbit666 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
Do you know if they plan on changing
Not much choice, chan_sip is deprecated.
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Phew! Wow, I just spent quite some time reading through almost every comment in this thread.
Fast forward to now, it seems like most issues were addressed.Worth mentioning that we have been using VitalPBX in single and multi-tenant mode since I think early 2019 and have struggled with a ton of issues, but we are glad to see the progress they have made.
This was a good throwback ride!