I have been searching google, yet I can’t find an answer on the question. I have been tasked with upgrading the Asterisk servers at my workplace from 1.8 running on Ubuntu 12.4 to AsteriskNow 13.
First, I know very little about Asterisk, yet I have been watching all of the videos on youtube to try and catch up. I also know very little about Linux as my primary focus is in Windows and networking.
I currently have AsteriskNow installed on two new servers which are being setup for the migration process. I will have them in an HA pair and running to two different switches on the same subnet. We have an old access database which was used to provision phones and configure the dialplan. The extensions have “macro” at the end in the dialplan as well.
Is it possible to pull all of the old extensions as a CSV file to import into the new AsteriskNow server via the bulk extension module? What all should I migrate over other than just the extensions? How do I migrate those things over? Since I’m going from 1.8 to 13 will I have conflicts in syntax, modules, etc?
I apologize for all the questions, I really am just in the dark here and am trying my best to make this work.
The only thing that would have any structured list of extensions is FreePBX, which is supported at http://community.freepbx.org/.
Extensions in Asterisk has a different meaning from that in FreePBX and roughly correspond to subroutines in a computer program, whereas FreePBX uses them to reference what Asterisk would typically call Devices and would appear in sip.conf, chan_dahdi.conf, etc.
So does that mean I will have to enter all the extensions in again by hand? Is moving from Asterisk running off ubuntu to an AsteriskNow a difficult migration?
Asterisk to Asterisk, you will need to copy the configuration files and then look at the UPGRADE*.txt files to see if you are using any features that require changes to them.
General case Asterisk to FreePBX - probably impossible.
FreePBX to pure Asteirisk. You will need to keep all the FreePBX dialplan and AGI code, so it will really be FreePBX for most purposes.
I have no experience of Asterisk Realtime Architecture, so I can’t answer for that.
FreePBX, being a GUI, has a constrained structure on what you can do with it. Asterisk, being a toolkit doesn’t. That means that all but the simplest Asterisk configurations will not correspond to something that can be simply represented by FreePBX.
Generally these GUIs are not tools for constructing arbitrary Asterisk configurations, but, rather, impose their own model on the world. That model is typically one that suits a lot of common uses. They then introduce a lot of special dialplan to implement that model.
I think your installation is extremely custom. If you don’t have any experience with Asterisk and writing dialplan applications, you should go with a new FreePBX distro installation. You will have to import everything manuallay but in the lond run the administration of your pbx would be easier and the learning curve is pretty low.