After a little bit of investigation, mainly on the facilities offered, I have decided to install a full copy of the latest version of Elastix (1.5.2-2). It appears to offer the most features. It is a fairly new product in the area of Asterisk based appliances, and it does appear very good.
I installed it into a Sun VM from their 32bit ISO image and it all installed without a hitch. Connected to web interface first go and wandered around the various pages to examine the features. Most of which looked ideal for my needs. Have a look at their web site for a full list, little point in me repeating myself here.
I won’t even bother with an install article for the moment as the one on the Elastic web site is good enough. However, other articles are poor I have to say. So I will offer my own versions here as I make my way through getting the system up and running. I will re-install the VM version and generally write articles based on that system as well as my real system.
I mentioned in another article that I had borrowed a Digium TDM400 card cw a FXO and a FXS module. This I installed into the computer system I have now called Maple and installed Elastix 1.5.2-2 onto it. The install went perfectly, as did my initial test on a VM, and I can access the web interface no problem.
I have also connected via SSH for telnet and SFTP without issue and have used these to update the system ‘hosts’ file (so Maple knows about my other systems by name) and via SSH I have triggered ‘yum’ to update all the packages installed. I do prefer to keep my systems fully up to date. I don’t know if this is a good or bad thin as far as Elastic goes, but hay-ho we shall see. There were some 213 updates required.
The Digium card was detected:
Elastix detection of TDM400 with FXO in slot 4
I will write a supporting artile on how I configured this temporary install of this card while my single port FXO card comes through the post (next week with a little luck, I ordered it yesterday from IPChitChat for £20 + p&P).
After the updates have installed, I will attempt to install my favourite administration tool for Linux - Webmin.
Related posts:
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- HowTo: Updating Elastix and CentOS via YUM As with all operating systems and software packages, updates are...
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Adam,
Thanks a lot for explaining this technical issue to me! I guess I’ll install it on a separate machine. Originally I thought that VM could be used for everything, but unfortunately it has many limitations in practice. Although as you said it’s a great platform for software testing.
Also I’ll try running VM within VM for the laugh, but only when I get more familiar with using just one VM. It should be funny!
Thanks,
Paul
Paul,
Sorry to say, one of the limitations of a Virtual Machine (VM) is that it has very limited access to hardware. A selection of hardware interfaces is made available via BIOS calls only (no hardware access):
USB
IDE/SATA
SCSI
Serial
Sound
Network
Display
These are all quite easy to link the physical HW through to a VM because they are all interfaced through software BIOS calls and not the actual hardware.
Your TDM card is probably PCI, and because it can’t be interfaced totally in software, but with instructions to directly talk to the hardware.
Anything in the VM that actually needs to talk to the hardware directly (like your TDM card) can’t be supported. If software inside a VM wants to talk to even just a serial port directly, then this would fail too. Through the BIOS to the serial port, no problem.
You will need to install Elastix in real hardware with your real card I’m sorry to say.
VMs can not access any expansion cards or hardware directly. As a rule of thumb, anything that needs a driver of some sort, can’t be used. Although you can install the drivers, there is nothing there for them to talk to. Mapping of I/O ports and memory would breach all modern security principles. Have a Google and read up on what a software ‘sandbox’ is and this might help you understand the limitation of a VM.
The idea to use Elastix inside a VM is to allow you to test a system that just uses network based devices with a small set up. I would not want to operate a ‘production’ system inside a VM for Elastix. It would just not really be up to the job (timing issues).
I have a virtual set up of 3 Elastix boxes on a isolated VPN (so they can only talk to themselves) to test interlinking the systems to prove the settings before moving to a ‘Production’ system. It there for ‘testing’ nothing else really.
Presenting the data on this web site was to allow people to see how easy Elastix is to install, configure and use, without having to shell out lots of money on a dedicated system just to try.
Sorry it’s a limitation of VMs. They may develop VMs to have access to hardware directly in the future, but I think this is very unlikely in the next few years (I maybe wrong), but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen. I’ve had enough trouble getting a VM to talk to a USB/1-Wire interface module, let alone something as complicated as a PCI device!
Adam.
P.S. Something that really works badly is a VM inside a VM! Try it for a laugh.
Hiya!
I got Elastix working fine and everything. I decided to upgrade my system by putting in Yealink TMD400 card with SO module. But the problem is ‘Hardware Detect’ doesn’t detect my card. What should I do in this case? Does this have anything to do with me running Elastix through VirtualBox instead of bare install or should I try to do something else?
Thanks!
Paul
Adam,
Thank You very much for your help! I got it working now. Setting network card to ‘Intel PRO 10/100 MT Desktop’ and connection type to ‘bridged’ or ‘through host’ (like on my version on VM) as you said got the problem sorted. I hope this helps other users. This appears to be the major problem people are having with setting up Elastix and other VMs in general.
Thanks!
Paul
Paul,
A few things you can look at:
1) In your VM, make sure the network connection type is ‘bridged’. This will allow the VM to be just another system on your network. You need to stop the VM, change the setting and restart. If it is anything else, you probably won’t be able to connect. Choose which physical interface it should be connected to, set to ‘Intel PRO 10/100 MT Desktop’ and make sure it has a suitable MAC address (click the refresh button to the right to generate a new random MAC address in case there is a clash). And also make sure the cable is set to ‘connected’. You may need to re-install Elastix after you change these setting so the installer can detect the virtual network card.
2) Are you accessing it with your browser using https and not http. It should redirect you from http to https, but make sure you have the extra ‘s’ when trying to access it.
3) The most likely problem is that you don’t have the correct IP address. If you are running Elastix ‘headless’, then you need to make sure a console is available and then connect to it. Either ‘headless’ or normal, connect to the console, login and get the current IP address with the command ‘ifconfig’. Use this address to web connect to Elastix. When Elastix is first installed, it uses DHCP, so its address changes (or can change) each time you boot the system. When you login to the console, it should display the web address to connect with a browser. Once you have connected, change the IP address to a suitable static address so you can always connect to it!
4) While Elastix is booting up, watch for any error messages that may appear.
Have a go with those,
Adam.
Hiya!
In relation to installation of Elastix through virtual box, I can’t connect to it through web interface using the standard IP address it gives me. is there anything I can do? I heard it has something to do with the network settings of virtualbox, but I can’t get anything to make it work.
Thanks!
Since writing this, I have discovered that there is a very good PDF document title ‘Elastix withoutout Tears’. This clears up many of the short commings of the main documentation. This leaves less for me to have to document. So I will concentrate of specific things that I needed to do.