Blinkey Light

Having laid out my needs and wants in a IP-PBX here, let’s take a look at the platforms themselves, shall we? For the sake of convenience, I’ll divide them into No-Cost and Cost sections.

In the No-Cost section we have basic Asterisk, trixbox CE, trixbox Pro Standard, and PBX-In-A-Flash. By “No-Cost” I mean that the IP-PBX software won’t cost you anything. You still have to provide server hardware to run the system and buy all the phones and such, but you won’t incur any software costs. Digium (who owns the Asterisk brand now) distributes an official Asterisk package for free.

While you can certainly install Asterisk on your favorite Linux distro, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all, I was looking for more of an all-in-one install. I wanted to download an ISO, burn it to CD, drop it in the drive and go. AsteriskNOW is the basically that, using rPath linux and vanilla Asterisk. It’s as close to a basic Linux+Asterisk as anything and that’s probably why I felt the least comfortable with it. I think it’s a great platform, and hugely extensible. Someone with more familiarity with both Linux and Asterisk could probably make better use of it than me. Sadly, my Nix-Fu is weak.

My second freebie that I tested was trixbox CE. Formerly called Asterisk@Home, trixbox CE is owned by Fonality (makers of trixbox pro, reviewed later here). While I have concerns with the tone taken by Fonality’s devs and officers on various forums and blogs, I cannot fault the product itself. Installation is a breeze, and the admin interface is well laid out. I had no problems provisioning my test phones (Aastra 9133i’s). It even auto-provisioned them after I set one DHCP parameter. There are a few weird items of mention. The package manager cannot be accessed without logging into the trixbox forums. This necessitates creating a user on the trixbox forums as well. Not a huge deal, but an odd choice to be sure. I really liked HUDlite, the desktop control application. Really really slick. While ended up choosing another option for my business needs, this is the one I have installed at home now, because it was the easiest to configure and expand for other uses at home (SMB file server).

Next up was trixbox Pro. trixbox Pro (yes, trixbox is always all smallcase) is a weird bird, compared with all the other options. Fonality pitches it as a “Hybrid-hosted” system. Without getting into the details of hosted systems vs. on-site systems, lets just say that “hybrid-hosted” is very accurate and that, like many hybrids, trixbox Pro has most of the benefits and disadvantages of both parents. before installing you create an account with trixbox.com. After the install is done, the server connects via VPN to Fonality’s datacenter. While the server functions as a local server (call handling, trunk connections, etc. etc.), all administration is done through a web control panel at cp.trixbox.com. There are obvious security concerns with this type of setup (my biggest being the possiblility of a rogue trixbox employee nuking things), there are some very real strengths to it as well. Backups of configuration are automatic. Restores are also nearly automatic. Being a remote tech/admin for trixbox Pro is a cinch, since all admin is done remotely anyway. In case of a blowed-up server, simply replace the hardware, drop in the trixbox pro CD, type in your username and password at the prompt (post-install) and watch the config synchronize. Remote extensions are also a breeze, due to the built-in VPN. While I eventually chose a fully on-premise solution, I could see this as a strong contender for a consultant or reseller. FYI, if your site’s internet connection is down, the tbPro server continues to function as normal. you just cannot make config changes until the Internet comes back up. In the case of network topography changes (IP range change, gateway address change or some other local change in Internet access) there is a limited command-line interface to change these settings.

Last on the list was supposed to be PBX-In-A-Flash. I picked this up after reading a few things at nerdvittles.com. It looks pretty cool, but sadly I could never get it past the install. I couldn’t figure out how to administer the thing, so I moved on.

That’s all for the No-Cost options that I tried. Next up are the Costly options.