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[PBX] ZZZzzzzzzZZZ I sleep better at night....

I have to admit, I agree. After 2 years, my PBX is just running fine - even have a backup, just in case... It's been a workhorse, and you can't beat the functionality.

The ATA sits in the drawer, so if the PBX takes a dive, I can just quick swap it til I get the PBX fixed. 3CX has been my box of choice, just because it's so darn easy to work. On an "Unmanned" XP Box, it's not failed once. with software issues. It's usually some SillyHead who wanted to go on facebook that hoses your Windows box anyway.

Windows as an appliance... who'd have thunk it.

reply to VexorgTR
Actually, my experience is quite the opposite. Some years ago I had an Asterisk server hereabouts. As I was not then, nor am I now, a seasoned Linux sysadmin it created as many problems as it solved.

I am now much better served by using a hosted PBX service. I let the masters of such things handle the software updates, patches, DDOS, etc.

I went back to the business that I'm in, which is something completely different.
--
Michael Graves
Houston TX
»www.mgraves.org

reply to VexorgTR
I tend to walk both sides of this particular fence. Perhaps 3 or 4 sides, even.

I run a PBX and love its flexibility, and all the things Vex said. It has redundant Internet connections.

My ATA isn't in a drawer; it runs in parallel, direct to the router, bypassing the PBX, registering to my main provider, with robust battery backup. That provider fails-over to my cell.

The second port of that ATA registers to a hosted provider. Why not?

The Asterisk based linux PBX's always bothered me because of difficulty of back-up. I run with 3CX

reply to VexorgTR
Before we were paying 250/month to AT&T for 3 land lines, plus 50 to an answer service, and had a crappy old Samsung PBX system that didn't know what caller ID was.

Now we have an inhouse PBX, paying less than 50 a month in services, are no longer limited to how many concurrent phone calls to the outside we can have, and have a fantastic phone system.

Huge win.

reply to VexorgTR

reply to VexorgTR

rsync -avz --delete asterisk@asterisk: asterisk-backup/ &> asterisk-backup-log.txt
 

^^ rsync +1 ^^

reply to VexorgTR
Are you people talking about running a VOIP office telephone system on a PC and without an ATA?
Sorry if this is a really dumb question...
Rob.
--
Rob.
Blog: »googlevoiceforcanadians.com/

reply to RobThompson
No apology necessary You're correct we're referring to a (typically) office telephone system running on a PC. It's possible to connect an ATA, softphone, or IP phone to such a system.

Would it be difficult to set this up for a small office with 8 phones and 4 lines?
--
Rob.
Blog: »googlevoiceforcanadians.com/

It would be time consuming. If you already know about VoIP I'd rate the difficulty as moderate.

When you say 'time consuming' do you mean for the initial set up or forever?
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Rob.
Blog: »googlevoiceforcanadians.com/

I was referring to the initial setup. Once it's set up to your liking, you needn't do much with it except install security updates once in a while when they come out. And once you know what you're doing making configuration changes will be quite simple.

Depending on your choice of operating system, 3CX seems to be the most popular for Windows, or Asterisk or one of its many distros for Linux.

I just looked at the Anveo website and see that the 'Business' plan cost $44.85 per month for 6 users - does that mean 6 concurrent calls on one telephone number?
If so, does this mean that a PC/PBX, plus VoIP phones will complete the system?
--
Rob.
Blog: »googlevoiceforcanadians.com/

reply to RobThompson

reply to RobThompson
Depends on your knowledge and experience.

I just setup a system with just over 10 extensions and 2 phone lines. I had never touched anything PBX wise like this before so there was a lot of learning about VoIP and telphony.

It took a few weeks of research and playing around to learn and figure things out. Most of it was learning about Aterisk, VoIP, features, configuration, hardware phones, SIP, and LAN/WAN performance related things. In the end it was well worth it and now we are saving a boat load of money per month and have way more functionality compared to what we had.

I used Elastix and deployed it on a Dell Optiplex 755 we had with a couple of drives in RAID 1. And that's sort of the beauty of it as it is open source, and put together so that you can just go and USE it on common hardware.

Those solid state appliances are nice since you won't have to bother with things that can fail on a computer/server ie. fans, HDs, RAM, PSU etc. However at least those are individual components you can replace instead of throwing out the whole thing.