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Why Elastix/Issabel for Alternative Telephony?

Clickford, Steven M.

I have p!ssed on Asterisk systems for a number of years, and for rightful reasons. To say it’s an M1 is BSing. A claim it’s a sexier G3si, is screwing with you. Hell, NEC makes a better system… you just have to fork cash.

Ironically, like all other open source projects, they come and go, and the moment you settle on them, they may not settle on you. For instance, Trixbox was cool, in terms of manipulating the Asterisk daemon without attempting to tweak .conf files without taking down a box, was great. Guess who did that, a company who developed FreePBX. But FreePBX was sold off to another company, whom in turn would later buy Digium, the publishers behind the original Asterisk code by the end of the 2010s.

Oh the full circle!

I had downloaded the Free PBX distro circa 2018, and to be blunt, I hated it. One of the biggest turnoffs was you had to register (using a disposable email address) and if you did a full blown register, you can then set it to a static IP LAN address and then it could work without an Internet connection. Wait, this code is supposed to be “free” but it has to yet “phone home” and yet this derivative doesn’t require licenses.

I frankly don’t care for Sagmona, or however the hell you’re supposed to spell it. Their blue colors, the horribly designed IP sets (FFS alive, Digium designed better SIP sets than when they were sold off!) I was like, “there has to be more than FreePBX” and Elastix was so cool for a clear alternative to anything else. Enter Issabel

I had recently downloaded Issabel, and why them?

  • Didn’t I say how much I hated the current version of FreePBX?
  • Trixbox is basically dead (best to use for Museum-grade VOIP sets… yup there’s an age for VOIP sets to die into a isolated LAN for non Internet exposed devices.)
  • Freeswitch could be set to a PBX, but that’s like telling a 5ESS switch to act like an on-prem System 75… and it’s not easy to compile, and there is no distro.
  • If you liked OS X Server’s email and calendar features, and since Apple has taken server features out of the “Server”, Issabel can fill that void*
  • I prefer the older/classic FreePBX GUI.
  • Other than a better HTML5 experience, and you can tweak the system to do things like SCCP (even if people encourage to stick with SIP), when I chose Asterisk 1.6 it came with the Unistim drivers for the Avaya Blue sets; and other little things.

* Actually, it’s believed that most of the OS X installs were under 50 users, and in fact the email and messaging systems were recommended to be more of a “relay” server than a straight up, email storage and forwarding system like in Domino or Exchange install (and be directly exposed to the internet at the server level. In the GUI Wizards, the example in OS X server, was showing the system against another email server, and OS X instance was really just between the client and the bigger mail or calendar server.

Think of this as an always on desktop logged in as a user, times another 49 or so fetching the emails from either a cloud/corporate email. OS X Server would then be the one between the user, by simply forwarding it. Elastix/Issabel’s implementation of it’s email and messaging servers reminds me a lot like what was in the OS X Server  (in that “relay” mode) – including those “mail” servers found in Drobos and Synolgy based NAS; so I would recommend people to not have an Elastix email instance exposed directly to the Internet without some firewall in between to prevent it becoming a host of spam attacks.

In a future Installation Insensation; I’ll show you how the installs work and how they play well.

Elastix PBX Rundown

Clickford, Steven M.

 

I posted this as Vlog/Vlob post recently about this abandoned open source phone system. Elastix was a foreign made fork from Asterisk, that was a cheaper and free equivalent of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server and it’s Exchange server, but unlike MS’ OCS, at least there is a few more telephony features.

While Elastix had Exchange-like features for groupware, it’s PBX functionality is nowhere near an Aura or Cisco UCM. Elastix was unable to survive and was sold to 3CX. 3CX has and probably will still be a joke. What the 3CX people did, was took the brand, and took the 3CX code originally for Windows (because their selling point was it was more user friendly to administer than Asterisk) and ported it to a Linux distro to give the appearance they weren’t missing out.

Not too long after the original Elastix code went end of life, another organization took it’s code and made a fork of it and it’s called Issabel. Similar idea, cheaper Exchange functionality, but more reliable in it’s telephony service.

In this video, I had many of my Mitels I got from Jason via The Museum. Except for the 5207, all the others were capable of SIP. While the proprietary MiNet is preferred, I had decided, well instead of buying newer phones and collecting dust, to just repurpose them. I also noticed another Mitel phone system, the MX5000 (a rebadged InterTel system, after Mitel acquired them) that that phone system uses SIP for the VOIP phones, and while a couple of them I have are 5220s, if I were to get an MX5000 on the Interwebz down the road, it could theoretically work, then gain some Mitel/Intertel features.

This would be all for Media Services. Why?

My family has felt a phone system…

  • was part of the phone company’s “service” (Xfinity/Comcast Business.)
  • that each extension must be physical
  • if someone did a call pickup, bridged appearances, follow-me calling, family would not know where they are calling, and “loose track” of their adult child
  • Forget Do Not Disturb, they’ll think the network went down. (Not so much since March of 2020, where reliability was forced to go up given working from home requirements.)

Where does that leave any mobility? What if I want to park a call? So I decided that I’d use Elastix (and BTW there is no direct Internet exposure, since it’s on a non-routable LAN… and anyone who puts public IP or DNS on a SIP phone directly, is crazy, no matter what setup it is) for my media room and my bedroom. 1300 would be the “main number”, and do a dial-peer to SIP telephone number on the IP address of the Elastix box;  and the Cisco CallManager Express would calling another phone system as if it was an internal extension.

I have not been able to do outbound calling, but given the mandatory ten-digit calling in New Hampshire, this maybe easier. I’ve had issues even with the Avaya (see how I miss Key Phone Systems?)

Later in this video, I had discussed a potential migration to either Elastix and/or Isasbell and have the CME be the backup in case the server went down. In fact I would avoid SRST, and just use straight up CME; with the magic of using a Skinny Call Control Protocol driver. I do not have any spare SCCP sets laying around. This is preliminary and should be taken as speculation. 

 

Pondering Thoughts: Facebook Profiles for Business in 2021

Clickford, Steven M.

This is a pet-peeve of me. Everyone else preaches to follow any platform’s Terms of Service. I think somewhere on Facebook’s TOS, you can’t use a profile for a business. I’m too lazy to read legalese that has more words than The Bill of Rights.

I see this very often in some select New Hampshire business owners, that are the majority of the population. Female. Older than 30. Maybe single. I think I know who to blame. That demographic. Unless they had a bad luck with guys or what, I don’t understand why the hell they can use Facebook Pages (which has been the defacto standard for Small Enterprises since I think 2009) and despite it’s complexity, it’s better for a business to be a page.

Another issue by separating you from the business is key. A person cannot be a business and a business cannot be a person from a corporate governance perspective. No wonder why if small business had to list on a stock market, they’d be put out of business with SOX violations.

Alright, that was too far, but most often people befriend individuals and not businesses. And that has been the defacto standard since Pages’ existence. I wonder if there is a bigger picture issue that maybe it’s not PC to talk about. Perhaps our media outlets like WMUR-TV Manchester, WZID Manchester, maybe the statewide newspaper has given men under 40 a bad rap as they are apparently sex offenders and creeps, and the two broadcast outlets in Manch tend to favor female audience? Males are the minorities in this state, and sadly the messaging that WMUR-TV and WZID over the years have given false female empowerment by making *professional relationships* harder, and some of the ladies I see on Facebook profiles just clearly shows an apparent social vulernabilities  that shouldn’t even be one to begin with.

In short, stop aiding and abetting Facebook’s total “users” and move your business “profile” to a Facebook fan-page. Businesses can’t be on Facebook, except for the Pages. So do that now, because your super-corrupt-but-private “profile” is a violation to Facebook’s TOS. Period. Full Stop.

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VLOB: Don’t Let Data Be the Justification for Your Intellectual Stupidity

Clickford, Steven M.

I get to my point after 2:00​

After mentioning about how bad my mouse is and how long B&H is delivering my Kensington, and talking about how I got this Kensington from Small Dog Electronics in Manchester ,NH in 2010 before Apple took that very same space a few years later. Small Dog was for the longest time the 3rd highest reseller behind the VARs (CDW and [Mac] Connection) I connect the dots between using data and statistics to justify the reasons that autism is just-a-boy-problem and that parents of autistics have an even higher divorce rate than typicals (nearly half of all American marriages end in divorce.) Why do we say “the stats say it [so do it]’? Why do we treat people worse, because “the stats say so?” Are we this effed up? Do you know most data types are virgins who haven’t fucked a chick nor looked a naked chick?

VLOB: The Emmy Award Goes to Avid Technology…

Clickford, Steven M.

EDIT: 02-01-21: I had done some tweaks to my Avid workflow, and overall it’s been a better at exporting. It’s not as speedy as Final Cut Pro, but I love to have multiple tools to help do my job better. And since this recording, on Friday, January 29th, the Emmy to another NRCS went to The Associated Press’ ENPS platform. So everyone-is-a-winner.
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Another rant the day after I bitched on Avid after that recording: I was being bombarded on social media they got an Emmy for development of a new product Newsroom Computer Systems…better known as NRCS. No Emmy for that new Media Composer tho, just some really old systems with semi fancy GUI facades! 😀
Ironically Avid got into these businesses in the early 1990s before they went to George Lucas and got the Editdroid! Before the Associated Press’ ENPS in the late 1990s, they had almost total domination in terminal or PC-based NRCS networks vis-a-vis NewsStar, Basys and some company that did NRCS for NetWare networks.
Some of the code is older than I and old as CNN itself. Network World actually did a story on Basys on their first ever issue in 1986. I guess yeah for Avid to finally get an award under their name with these legacy products.

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VLOB: Dear Avid: Please Be more Software Centric

Clickford, Steven M.

I have a lot of Avid swag because I know someone who sells one of their flagship products. Just because I have that possible conflict of interest of being biased; I think Avid had shot their foot in 2008 when a software-centric/CPU-agnostic Final Cut Pro from Apple showed how you didn’t need iron clad boxes to edit video in the 2000s! Sadly, I see Avid being one of these vendors that are fleet-quality. Much like selling Fords in the masses to customers. Large edit houses and local TV stations buy HP and Dells mixed with Nvidia boards in bulk to satisfy Avid’s HCLs. Macs in general are a mixed bag.

Running Media Composer in some ways is like running an emulated application designed for another platform of a former generation. I have not tried anything past 2019 versions because I wanted to build so much knowledge on the legacy platform. I do sense of lapse of business decisions and R&D to just *improve* with modern hardware.

Any computer made after 2010 with a midline CPU and GPU; should be able to handle lower res 720p to 1080p without much hassle. Oh wait it’s possible. Edius for PCs, Final Cut Pro for Macs, and Adobe’s Premiere. Enterprise creative pros should have choices. Freelancers should be able to get a foot in the door. Locking out the environment in both a figurative and literal sense is a really sad message that this Middlesex County company is doing. Thank you if anyone cares to hear my constructive rant.