Newbie with Digium AA50 - now what?

Asterisk Asterisk Hardware
1

I’m an IT guy, but BRAND new to Asterisk. Picked up an AA50 off ebay, seems to work well (after system reset). I can log into the GUI, it’s running 1.3.0.5. It’s got a DHCP connection, and connected to a test network that has internet access. It was dirt cheap, so figured I could get it to work on some level.

My goal is to set this up to manage 2 POTS lines and a couple old-school hard phone extensions internally - really just looking for a simple PBX with a greeting tree for the caller.

I poked a little bit, tried to check for firmware updates and get the Service Providers list - and neither complete successfully. I’m assuming the resources they’re trying to find have changed, and that the OS doesn’t know about the changes.

Is there a way to get this device updated to the latest firmware that is more aware? What would that firmware version be? Is it best to convert this to a FreePBX device (if that’s even possible)? Is there some other direction I should pursue?

Or is it destined for the the scrap bin?

Any advice would be appreciated - good or bad :slight_smile:

Thanks.

2

okay, i found the uimage-2.0.0.7 file in the aa50 telephony downloads on digium.com, figured out how to get SSH access to the device, and found the flashupdate command that has successfully downloaded and is currently verifying the MD5 checksum - yeah!
I’ll see where that gets me…

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Asterisk GUI was abandoned about a decade ago, so an update to the final version will still leave you far behind.

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so is the hardware useless, or is there an alternate path/OS for it?

Thanks.

5

Someone may have an answer, if you give them time, but it is styled as an appliance, and therefore is a black box, so, whilst it may well be based on a standard industrial PC board and standard analogue voice cards, there is no information available on that.

Are you able to take and upload photographs if the internals. Google couldn’t find any. It might help people work out what is beneath the branding.

It is flash based, so any replacement firmware may have to minimise the amount of writing it does, e.g. it may be undesirable have a page file. 10+ year old flash may not have as good wear levelling as up to date products.

If it has standard analogue cards, they are probably out of production. Sangoma got carried away and removed unsupported devices from DAHDI, although people are trying to get them added back and they are available on the web. The chances are that the analogue hardware is based on end of life products.

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