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Hardware Device of the Year: Meet the CuBox-i with Incredible PBX for Ubuntu

By in Smartphones, Technology, Telephony on .

It’s been many years since we’ve written back-to-back articles about the same device. That should tell you how really special the CuBox-i is. After two weeks of 14-hour days developing the new Incredible PBX platform for CuBox, we are thrilled to crown this jewel as Nerd Vittles Hardware Device of the Year. Flawless design, incredible performance, tiny size, feature-rich components, minimal power consumption, and completely silent operation are merely the tip of the iceberg with this 2x2x2 cubic zircon. On the $130 CuBox-i4PRO, there’s a Quad Core processor, 2 gigs of RAM, a 10/100/1000 Ethernet port, a 1080p HDMI port, two powered USB 2 ports, an eSATA II port for an external drive, a realtime clock with backup battery, an Optical S/PDIF Audio Out port, a microSD port, an infrared receiver and transmitter, WiFi 11n, and Bluetooth plus a power adapter to match either American or European power sources. Whew! And here’s the best part. Everything works while squeezed in a tiny case that’s a third the size of Rubic’s Cube.

A SOHO Swiss Army Knife That Fits in Your Cupholder: Voice, Fax, SMS, TTS, Email, PBX, Incredible!

Did we mention it’s a near perfect VoIP platform for any home office or small business? Well, it is. And everything we’ve learned about Asterisk® and FreePBX® and Internet security over the past decade is rolled into today’s release of our crown jewel edition of Incredible PBX™ for the CuBox. First, you’ll need to purchase one and we strongly recommend the CuBox-i4PRO with its Quad Core ARM processor and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. In the U.S, there’s NewEgg or NewEgg (10% off on i4PRO with promo code SW829NE10 = $117 until 9/4). In the U.K, there’s NewIT. For everyone else, you can buy directly from SolidRun, the creator.

Before we dive into Incredible PBX, we want to express our deepest appreciation to Zhando and Josh North of PIAF Forum fame. Zhando’s pioneering efforts with Ubuntu and Incredible PBX on the CuBox platform and Josh North’s morphing of Incredible Fax for deployment with Ubuntu paved the way for everything you’re about to read. It reinforces the spectacular results which can be achieved in the open source community when a talented group of even a few folks put their heads together. The Ubuntu developers and the tens of thousands of open source contributors from around the world also deserve a well-earned tip of the hat for producing a Linux platform that is rock-solid reliable and incredibly versatile. Nearly 1,000 open source packages are included in the latest Incredible PBX build. Click on the link to view the package list in PDF format and prepare to be amazed. We couldn’t have done it without all of you!

Introducing Incredible PBX 11.12.0 for the CuBox-i4PRO

If you’re new to Asterisk and the world of VoIP telephony, let us take a moment and explain how Incredible PBX fits into the puzzle. For lack of a better term, Incredible PBX on the CuBox platform is a turnkey aggregation in a bootable image that is based upon a superset of Ubuntu 14 packages plus Asterisk, the FreePBX GUI, and a sizable collection of applications for the Asterisk platform. You download a tarball, decompress it, write the image file to a microSD card, insert the card into your CuBox-i, and presto! You’ve got a turnkey PBX. Add credentials for a trunk or two to make and receive calls, connect some phones, and your whole office will come alive with a versatile PBX platform that used to cost organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s included in Incredible PBX? Glad you asked. Here’s a 3-minute video showcasing a few of our favorite Incredible PBX text-to-speech applications:


The Incredible PBX 11 Inventory. Here’s the current feature set on the CuBox platform. It’s the most robust ever! In addition to its superset of nearly 1,000 Ubuntu 14 packages, Asterisk 11, and FreePBX 2.11 with Apache, SendMail, MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin, Fail2Ban, WebMin, and the IPtables Linux firewall, check out these additions:

A Few Words About Security. Thanks to its Zero Internet Footprint™ design, Incredible PBX is different. It remains the most secure Asterisk-based PBX around. What this means is Incredible PBX has been engineered to sit anywhere, either behind a NAT-based, hardware firewall or directly on the Internet. No device other than those on your private LAN, a few of the major (trusted) SIP providers around the world, and those that you authorize on your WhiteList can even see your server. Additional IP addresses can be added to the WhiteList in three ways:

  1. An administrator registers new IP addresses using add-ip or add-fqdn from the Linux CLI
  2. A remote user sends the (correct) randomized PortKnock code assigned to your CuBox
  3. A remote user dials in from a standard telephone to register a new remote IP address

Read about this $100,000 VoIP phone bill, and you’ll better appreciate why WhiteList-based server security has become absolutely essential. WhiteList Security means only those devices with a registered IP address in your WhiteList can get to your server’s resources. To the NSA and everyone else, your server doesn’t even show up on the radar. Their only way to contact you is a POTS telephone using your published phone number. Our complete tutorial on Travelin’ Man 3 is available here. With Incredible PBX for CuBox, it’s installed and preconfigured.

Installing Incredible PBX 11.12.0 on the CuBox-i

There are five simple steps to get Incredible PBX up and running on your CuBox:

  1. Purchase a storage device
  2. Download Incredible PBX image
  3. Untar the image on your desktop
  4. Burn the image to a microSD card
  5. Insert microSD card in CuBox and boot

Choosing a Storage Platform. Unless you plan to run your server with an external eSATA hard drive (CuBox-i4PRO tutorial here), the first step is to purchase a suitable microSD card. We recommend at least a 32GB Class 10 card from Transcend, SanDisk, or Kingston. All of them are under $20 on Amazon and most include free 2-day shipping for Prime customers. If using an eSATA drive, you still need a microSD card to boot up, but any 4GB or 8GB card will suffice.1

Downloading Incredible PBX for CuBox. From your favorite desktop computer, download the latest build of Incredible PBX from SourceForge. Depending upon your network connection and the SourceForge mirror, it can take awhile. It’s a whopping 1.3GB!

Untarring Incredible PBX for CuBox. Depending upon your desktop platform, untarring incrediblepbx.4.cubox.U14.latest.tar.gz is as simple as double-clicking on it in the Downloads folder (on a Mac). On the Windows platform, here are 3 utilities that will do the job. On a Linux desktop, open a Terminal window and…

tar zxvf incrediblepbx.4.cubox.U14.latest.tar.gz

Burning the Incredible PBX image to microSD. Once you’ve untarred the file, you’ll find two scripts that make burning the image to a microSD card simple if you’re on a Mac or Linux desktop. On a Windows machine, it’s a little more complicated. Most SD cards come preformatted with a DOS partition so your Windows machine should recognize the microSD card when it’s inserted. If not, format the card using a utility such as SD Card Formatter. Next, you’ll need Win32 Disk Imager to burn cubox.img to your card. Once the image has been transferred, gracefully unmount the card from your desktop, and then remove the card from the SD card adapter.

Booting Incredible PBX on the CuBox. Insert the microSD card (electronics side up) into your CuBox-i. Then apply power to the CuBox after connecting a USB keyboard, HDMI monitor, and Ethernet cable to a network with Internet connectivity that can also hand out DHCP addresses. Log into Incredible PBX as root with cubox as your password. Your SSH credentials, Asterisk DUNDI secrets, logs, and network connection options will be initialized and then your server will reboot. You may need to hit the Enter key once or twice during the SSH credentials initialization to move things along. And, with some SD cards, you may find yourself waiting an eternity for the promised reboot. After seeing the "rebooting" message, count to ten. If your server still hasn’t rebooted, remove and reapply power. This quirk goes away after the first reboot.

After the reboot, log in again as root with password: cubox. Your firewall setup will be initialized to lock down your whitelist to your server’s public and private IP addresses AND the IP address of the machine from which you’re logging in. All of your FreePBX passwords will be randomized and your secret PortKnocker codes will be generated. The whole process only takes a few seconds.

When the second pass configuration is complete, you will be greeted by a welcoming message. STOP and read it. It has loads of important information about your server’s configuration and your next steps. Press ENTER to review status:

The Next 10 Steps. Before you do anything else, complete the following steps. It only takes a minute to secure and properly configure your server:

  1. Change your root password: passwd
  2. Change your FreePBX admin password: /root/admin-pw-change
  3. Set your correct time zone: /root/timezone-setup
  4. Expand partition to match microSD card size: /root/resize-partition
  5. Add any desired IP addresses to WhiteList: /root/add-ip
  6. Put PortKnocker credentials in a safe place: cat /root/knock.FAQ
  7. Change AvantFax admin password: /root/avantfax-pw-change
  8. Set Email Address for Incoming Faxes: /root/avantfax-email-dest
  9. Check status to be sure everything is working: status
  10. If using an eSATA external drive, do the migration drill (note the free disk space in status above)

A Few Important Tips. Every operating system and service provider has their quirks. Ask Bill Gates! Ubuntu and especially Comcast are no different. Fortunately, with Ubuntu, it’s a very short list.

1. Use the following commands (only!) to shutdown and restart your server: halt and reboot. These commands are reworked in Incredible PBX to gracefully shutdown important services so that files don’t get damaged. Please use them!

2. If you ever want to move your server to a different network, complete these three simple steps before you leave your existing network. This will trigger a new Phase I update (outlined above) and set the default network back to wired eth0 using DHCP the next time you boot your server.

touch /etc/update_hostconfig
/root/enable-eth0-only
# press Ctrl-C when prompted to reboot. then type:
halt

3. You really do need email connectivity to get the most out of Incredible PBX. It’s the way you receive important notifications from FreePBX, and it’s also how faxes and voicemail messages are delivered. From the Linux CLI, test your server to be sure you can send emails reliably:

echo "test" | mail -s testmessage yourname@gmail.com

After checking your spam folder, if you really didn’t get the email, it may be that your service provider is blocking downstream SMTP traffic. You can use your provider’s SMTP server as a smarthost to send out mail with SendMail. Just edit /etc/mail/sendmail.cf, search for DS, and add the provider’s SMTP server address immediately after it (no spaces!), e.g. DSsmtp.comcast.net or DSsmtp.knology.net. Then restart SendMail: service sendmail restart.

Once you’ve logged into FreePBX below, be sure to set your default email address in the right margin of Admin -> Module Admin and save your entry. This will assure receipt of timely notifications of FreePBX updates for your server.

4. If you’re sure you’ll never need remote access in an emergency, you can disable PortKnocker at startup and save about 5% of your processing cycles. Our complete PortKnocker tutorial is available here. To disable startup on boot, issue the following command from the Linux CLI:

update-rc.d -f knockd disable

5. The same applies to WebMin. We actually introduced one of the first tutorials for WebMin… over 9 years ago. A word to the wise: WebMin is a terrific tool for looking at stuff about your system. But be very careful making system changes with WebMin. You usually will break some of the customized settings in Incredible PBX. This is particularly true in the case of the IPtables firewall. To access WebMin, use a browser and the actual IP address of your server to go to: https://12.34.56.78:9001. Log in as root with your root password. To disable automatic startup of WebMin on boot: 

update-rc.d -f webmin disable

Setting Up WiFi with the CuBox-i4PRO

This may sound simple now, but two weeks ago it was quite a different story. For those with a CuBox-i4Pro, WiFi is built into the hardware. The trick was getting it to work. Well, with Incredible PBX, it does. In the /root folder, you’ll find several self-explanatory scripts to do the heavy lifting for you. For options 2 and 3, you’ll need the SSID of the WiFi network you’ll be using as well as the SSID password.

  1. enable-eth0-only (the default setting)
  2. enable-wifi-eth0 (enables both but eth0 works with Asterisk)
  3. enable-wifi-only (runs your server purely on WiFi)

Getting Started with VoIP and FreePBX

Up to now, all of your time has been spent using the Linux CLI. That will be a rarity once you get this far. Henceforth, 90% of your time setting up Incredible PBX will be done using the FreePBX GUI and your favorite web browser. To access it, just point to the IP address of your server. status will tell you the address if you’ve forgotten it. The main control panel looks like this:

As configured, the default user account for both FreePBX and AvantFax administration is admin. The passwords are whatever you set in steps #2 and #7 above. As configured, email delivery of faxes with AvantFax is automatic so no further setup is required other than setting a delivery mechanism for faxes within FreePBX.

For those new to Asterisk and FreePBX, here’s a brief primer on what needs to happen before you can make and receive calls. If you have an existing Google Voice account or a smartphone that’s less than 2 years old, lucky you. This gets you a phone number for your PBX so people can call you. And it provides a vehicle to place calls to plain old telephones at little or no cost.

If you don’t have a Google Voice account or a shiny new smartphone, then you will need to purchase a SIP trunk from one of the numerous vendors around the world. Our favorite (because they provide terrific service at a modest price AND provide financial support to the Nerd Vittles, PBX in a Flash, and Incredible PBX projects) is Vitelity. Their special rates and a link for a discount are included at the end of today’s article.

Unlike POTS phone service from Ma Bell, the SIP World is a little different. First, you don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. A trunk that gets you a phone number for incoming calls need not be with the same vendor that provides a trunk to place outbound calls. In fact, you may want multiple trunks for outbound calls just to have some redundancy. A list of our favorites in the U.S. and Canada is available on the PIAF Forum. Of course, there also are providers that offer all-you-can-eat calling plans. Two of our favorites are Vestalink and Future-Nine.

You’ll also need a softphone or SIP phone to actually place and receive calls. YATE makes a free softphone for PCs, Macs, and Linux machines so download your favorite and install it on your desktop.

Phones connect to extensions in FreePBX to work with Incredible PBX. Extensions talk to trunks (like Google Voice) to make and receive calls. FreePBX uses outbound routes to direct outgoing calls from extensions to trunks, and FreePBX uses inbound routes to route incoming calls from trunks to extensions to make your phones ring. In a nutshell, that’s how a PBX works.

There are lots of bells and whistles that you can explore down the road including voicemail, conferencing, IVRs, autoattendants, paging, intercoms, CallerID lookups, announcements, DISA, call parking and pickup, queues, ring groups, and on and on. And then there’s all of the Incredible PBX applications which are covered separately in this Nerd Vittles article. Once you’re comfortable with one server, you or your company will want some more. This Nerd Vittles article will walk you through interconnecting them into a seamless mesh network so that you can call from one office to another transparently. Yes, those articles were written for the Raspberry Pi. But the beauty of Incredible PBX is that it runs identically on virtually every server platform.

Here’s our 10-Step Checklist to Getting Started with FreePBX:

1. Setting Up Google Voice. If you want free calling in the U.S. and Canada, then you’ll need an existing Google Voice account that includes the Google Chat feature. You’ll need one dedicated to Incredible PBX, or it won’t work. Log out after setting up the new Google Voice account! Also note that Google Voice may cease to function at any time after May 15, 2014. You can read all about it here.

  • Log into existing Google Voice account
  • Enable Google Chat as Phone Destination
  • Configure Google Voice Calls Settings:

    • Call Screening – OFF
    • Call Presentation – OFF
    • Caller ID (In) – Display Caller’s Number
    • Caller ID (Out) – Don’t Change Anything
    • Do Not Disturb – OFF
    • Call Options (Enable Recording) – OFF
    • Global Spam Filtering – ON

  • Place test call in and out using GMail Call Phone
  • Log out of your Google Voice account

2. Activating a Google Voice Trunk. To create a Trunk in FreePBX to handle calls to and from Google Voice, you’ll need three pieces of information from the Google Voice account you set up above: the 10-digit Google Voice phone number, your Google Voice account name, and your Google Voice password. Choose Connectivity -> Google Voice (Motif) from the FreePBX GUI. The following form will appear:

Fill in the blanks with your information and check only the top 2 boxes. If your Google Voice account name ends in @gmail.com, leave that out. Otherwise, include the full email address. Then click Submit Changes and Apply Config.

There’s one more step or your Google Voice account won’t work reliably with Incredible PBX! From the Linux command prompt while logged into your server as root, restart Asterisk: amportal restart

3. Setting a Destination for Incoming Calls and Managing Faxes. Now that you’ve created your Google Voice Trunk, we need to tell FreePBX how to process inbound calls when someone dials your Google Voice number. There are any number of choices. You could simply ring an extension. Or you could ring multiple extensions by first creating a Ring Group which is just a list of extension numbers. Or you could direct incoming calls to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. By default, Incredible PBX is configured to route all incoming calls to extension 701. You can change the setting whenever you like by choosing Connectivity -> Inbound Routes -> Default. In the Set Destination section of the form, change the target destination from the pull-down lists.

If you want your default inbound route to also handle incoming faxes, then go to the Fax Detect section of the Default inbound route. Change Detect Faxes to Yes. Change Fax Detection Type to SIP. Leave the Detection Time setting at 4. And change the Fax Destination to Custom Destinations: Fax (Hylafax). To Send Faxes, open AvantFax in FreePBX’s Other pulldown menu.

Always click Submit and then click Apply Config to save new settings in FreePBX.

4. Activating a Smartphone Trunk Using Bluetooth. One of the more exotic features of Incredible PBX on the CuBox platform is the ability to add your smartphone as an Asterisk trunk using Bluetooth. We’ve written a short recipe to get things working. So have a look at our Bluetooth tutorial and see if you’re up for the challenge. Moral of the story: the newer the cellphone, the better.

The LG G3 is the best of the lot, at least of the numerous cellphones we tested. Even better is an LG G3 paired with StraightTalk’s (AT&T-hosted) unlimited talk, text, and data plan for $45 a month. With Samsung smartphones older than a Galaxy S4, don’t waste your time. Ditto with Apple iPhones other than perhaps the very latest. Our iPhone 4S failed miserably. We gave up on Apple phones after that. Someday I’ll test my daughter’s 5c and report back.

5. Activating Additional Trunks with FreePBX. As we mentioned, there are lots of SIP providers to choose from. Once you have signed up for service, configuring the trunk is easy. Here is a quick Cheat Sheet courtesy of Kristian Hare, who translated our original setups into a spreadsheet. Just click on the image below to open it in a new window. Then click on the redisplayed image to enlarge it. The left and right cursor keys will move you around in the image. Click on the image again to shrink it.

6. Changing Extension Passwords. From the main FreePBX GUI, choose Applications -> Extensions. Then click on 701 in the Extension List on the right side of your display. You’ll see a form that looks like this:

For now, we only need to make a few changes. First, you need a very secure password for both the extension itself and your voicemail account for this extension. The extension secret needs to be a combination of letters and numbers. The Voicemail Password needs to be all numbers, preferably six or more. Replace the existing password entries with your own (very secure) entries. You also need to lock down this extension so that it is only accessible from devices on your private LAN. You do that with the deny and permit entries which currently are filled with zeroes. Leave the deny entry the way it is which tells Incredible PBX to block everybody except those allowed in the permit entry below. For the permit, we need the first three octets of your private LAN address, e.g. if your LAN is 192.168.0.something then the permit entry will be 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0.

Finally, you need to plug in your actual email address in the Voicemail section so that voicemails can be delivered to you when someone leaves a message. You can also include a pager email address if you want a text message alert with incoming voicemails. If you want the voicemails to automatically be deleted from the server after they are emailed to you (a good idea considering the disk storage limitations of your microSD card), change the Delete Voicemail option from No to Yes. That’s it. Now save your settings by clicking the Submit button. Then reload the dialplan by clicking on the red prompt when it appears.

In case you’re curious, unless you’ve chosen to automatically delete voicemails after emailing them, you can retrieve your voicemails by dialing *98701 from any extension on your phone system. You’ll be prompted to enter the voicemail password you set up. In addition to managing your voicemails, you’ll also be given the opportunity to either return the call to the number of the person that called or to transfer the voicemail to another extension’s voicemail box. And you can always leave a voicemail for someone by dialing their extension number preceded by an asterisk, e.g. *701 would let someone leave you a voicemail without actually calling you.

7. Eliminating Audio and DTMF Problems. You can avoid one-way audio on calls and touchtones that don’t work with these simple settings in FreePBX: Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. Just plug in your public IP address and your private IP subnet. Then set ULAW as the only Audio Codec.

8. Configuring Your YATE Softphone. As we mentioned, the easiest way to get started with Incredible PBX is to set up a free YATE softphone on your Desktop computer. Versions are available at no cost for Macs, PCs, and Linux machines. Just download the appropriate one and install it from this link. Once installed, it’s a simple matter to plug in your extension 701 credentials and start making calls. Run the application and choose Settings -> Accounts and click the New button. Fill in the blanks using the IP address of Incredible PBX, 701 for your account name, and whatever password you created for the extension. Click OK.

Once you are registered to extension 701, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place your first call. It’s that easy!

9. Configuring CallerID Superfecta. In order to match names with phone numbers, Incredible PBX includes a FreePBX application named CallerID Superfecta. Out of the box, Incredible PBX will work fine if you remember to activate CallerID Superfecta whenever you create a new Inbound Route. The CNAM entries also will be displayed in your CDR reports. For those not in the United States, you may prefer to use a lookup source for your numbers other than the ones preconfigured in CallerID Superfecta. You will find all of the available modules on the POSSA GitHub site. Just download the ones desired into /var/www/html/admin/superfecta/sources and then activate the desired sources in Admin -> CID Superfecta -> Default. You can test your results and the performance using the Debug facility that’s built into the module.

10. Adding Speech Recognition for Incredible Applications. We used to include Google’s Speech-to-Text service in Incredible PBX builds. Unfortunately, Google has changed the rules a bit. Assuming your server still meets the "personal and development" standard, you can obtain an API key from Google and reactivate speech-to-text functionality for many of the Incredible PBX applications including Weather Reports by City (949), AsteriDex Voice Dialing by Name (411), SMS Dictator (767), and Wolfram Alpha for Asterisk (4747). To activate the STT service, just complete the steps in our tutorial. Then sign up for a Wolfram Alpha App ID (tutorial here), and run the following install scripts:

/root/wolfram/wolframalpha-oneclick.sh
/root/smsdictator/sms-dictator.sh

Enabling SAMBA Windows Networking with Ubuntu

It only takes a minute to enable SAMBA Windows Networking on your CuBox. We’ve reproduced our quick tutorial to show you how. Just follow the steps below to interconnect Incredible PBX with all the other computers on your LAN.

apt-get -y install samba samba-common python-glade2 system-config-samba
cd /etc/samba
mv smb.conf smb.orig.conf
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/samba-ubuntu.tar.gz
tar zxvf samba-ubuntu.tar.gz
rm *.tar.gz
sed -i '/# End of Trusted Provider Section/r '/etc/samba/smb.iptables'' /etc/iptables/rules.v4
iptables-restart
service smbd restart
service nmbd restart
sed -i 's|/usr/local/sbin/amportal restart|service smbd restart\\nservice nmbd restart\\n/usr/local/sbin/amportal restart|' /etc/rc.local
# set up root password for SAMBA access with full RW privileges
smbpasswd -a root

Incredible Backup and Restore

Once you have everything configured, it’s time to take a snapshot of your system and store it in a safe place. The new Incredible Backup lets you do that. From the Linux CLI, login as root and run: /root/incrediblebackup. The backup image will be saved to the /tmp folder and can be copied to a different server easily. To restore the backup to another system, you simply bring the other system up to the same version of Asterisk (11) and FreePBX (2.11), and then run /root/incrediblerestore with your backed up image. It’s the cheapest insurance you can buy! For detailed instructions on restoring backups, see this thread on the PIAF Forum.

Don’t forget to List Yourself in Directory Assistance so everyone can find you by dialing 411. And add your new number to the Do Not Call Registry to block telemarketing calls. Or just call 888-382-1222 from your new number.

Originally published: Monday, September 1, 2014

Support Issues. With any application as sophisticated as this one, you’re bound to have questions. Blog comments are a terrible place to handle support issues although we welcome general comments about our articles and software. If you have particular support issues, we encourage you to get actively involved in the PBX in a Flash Forums. It’s the best Asterisk tech support site in the business, and it’s all free! Please have a look and post your support questions there. Our forum is extremely friendly and is supported by literally hundreds of Asterisk gurus.


Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.

 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 

Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. Some of our links refer users to Amazon or other service providers when we find their prices are competitive for the recommended products. Nerd Vittles receives a small referral fee from these providers to help cover the costs of our blog. We never recommend particular products solely to generate commissions. However, when pricing is comparable or availability is favorable, we support these providers because they support us. [↩]

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4 Comments

  2. Sorry for posting here about Pogoplug 4 but apparently your forum has decided that my new account I have created just to reply does not give me any privileges to post. I’m quoting Nerd from the Pogoplug forum post:

    "2. MySQL likes about 40MB of RAM as a minimum. When you only have 128MB, that can be problematic. Apache likes boatloads of RAM. Asterisk appears happy at 20MB when nothing much is happening. We avoided RAM exhaustion by setting up a 256MB swap file, but that can be a problem, too, since you’re operating with an SDcard. Possible solutions: (1) Don’t install FreePBX which eliminates the need for MySQL, Apache, and PHP… but what fun is that. (2) Build the image you want to use with step #1 above and never use a browser to open FreePBX. This keeps Apache usage to a minimum just handling FreePBX’s operational requirements for managing calls. In this setup, the Yahoo News app runs without a hiccup, and it’s a memory hog: sox and mpg123 easily consume 98% of the RAM resources just processing the text-to-speech for the call. But only 192 bytes of swap file were required to process everything without any noticeable degradation."

    Here is my experience. I have been running Asterisk+Freepbx (3 servers) for about 9 years on this piece of cheap hardware: http://www.amazon.com/RCA-RM4100-Internet-Media-Player/dp/B0096SIHJS
    It only has 128MB but with few tricks Freepbx interface is pretty snappy. 1st advice: forget about Apache, it is a bloatware compare to lighttpd. Believe me, whole Freepbx runs without a hiccup on lighttpd instead of Apache, it take about 10 min to swap the web server and configure it.
    2nd advice: Minimize memory footprint of MySQL. How: swap default database engine to MyISAM. Of course it means that existing databases has to be rebuilt (if there are any). To do this just add lines to my.cnf

    skip-innodb
    default-storage-engine=MyISAM

    Hope this helps! (I have around 10 registered trunks, 15 extensions, 3 google voice accounts and chan_dongle). I’m using around 60% of memory with asterisk+freebpx running plus openvpn plus racoon+xltpd. No issues!

    [WM: Great suggestions. We always dump InnoDB, but tip #1 is worth a careful look. Thanks.]

  3. Another great article: thanks. You did not say much … in fact anything, unless I missed it.. about DAHDI support. As far as I can tell, the CuBox PCIe ports aren’t populated. I still run my own Asterisk variant on a fair-sized old machine mainly because I want to support a DAHDI gateway that needs PCI. I have looked at using an Intel Galileo that support micro-PCI (which can be used with PCIe) but have not yet taken that plunge. I would think supporting a DAHDI bridge would be a requirement for many home users, and would love to hear your thoughts on how to get there. For example, the HummingBoard-i2eX is made by the same company as the CuBox, I think and it supports PCIe. It seems like it should be CuBox compatible.

    [WM: Give it a whirl and let us know how it goes.]

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