Upgrade advice : From Asterisk 1.2 to?

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hello all,

New member, and I recently joined a new IT Team for a medium sized company. I am tasked with updating their phone system. Currently they are running on an ancient Asterisk 1.2.16 system, with pretty extensive call routing and extension rules setup. I’m new to Asterisk CLI, but I’ve worked with Digium systems before. I’m attempting to standardize all the Linux servers in the environment, and saw that the AsteriskNow iso has CentOS (the distro of choice), so I have downloaded that and am setting up a VM test environment.

My questions arise from, which version is recommended to upgrade to? Would it be worthwhile to do intermediate upgrades? I’d like to get to the newest LTS release which would be Asterisk 13. I’m looking for what any Asterisk experts would recommend in my situation. Any help is appreciated. For the time being I will be playing with the new versions, and seeing how well the configs transfer over. Thanks!

2

Howdy,

13’s the latest LTS, 11 is the last LTS. 13’s (and 12 before it) are a big jump compared to previous versions of Asterisk, especially in that there’s a new SIP channel driver, based on PJSIP.

One of the biggest things you’re going to notice is that pipes have been replaced by commas in your dialplan, that happened back between 1.2 and 1.4.

3

I’ve since decided to simply start from scratch and rebuild the call routing over, making any improvements as necessary. There have been too many changes made in the configs. I plan on doing a coexistence setup, with both servers on, and moving people over a bit at a time if that’s possible. Any thoughts on that idea?

4

I think that’s fine. It’s probably the least-stressful way of going about the move.