Building Asterisk and FreePBX on fenoras2

Brian

2019-08-22 20:18

Contents

Compiling and installing Asterisk
Installing FreePBX
Issues with running FreePBX on a shared server
Configuring FreePBX

Desiring more control over my landline phone and the E-Help Winnipeg line, both of which are supplied using SIP from VeVoIP, this week I decided to sww what would be needed to build both Asterisk and FreePBX on my home server. Not wanting to disturb my home server unnecessarily, I created a virtual machine on raven that’s essentially a clone of penguin and proceeded to build the programs there.

Most of these steps came from the version 14 installation instructions for CentOS 7 page at freebpx.org.

Compiling and installing Asterisk

Note: If you build a shell script using these commands, you should start it with the following lines:

1
2
3

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -o pipefail

Add a user to own asterisk
```
adduser asterisk -m -c "Asterisk User"
```

Install additional required dependencies

echo -n "Generating list of installed packages ... "
rpm -qa | sort >/r/rpm.packages.list; echo "done"
for PACKAGE in audiofile-devel cronie cronie-anacron crontabs git \
  gnutls-devel gtk2-devel httpd kernel-devel libtiff-devel libuuid-devel \
  libxml2-devel lynx mariadb mariadb-server mysql-connector-odbc \
  ncurses-devel net-tools newt-devel python-devel sox sqlite-devel \
  subversion texinfo tftp-server unixODBC uuid-devel vim wget
do
  echo -e "________________________________________________________________________________\n\n$PACKAGE\n"
  if grep -q "^$PACKAGE-" /r/rpm.packages.list
    then echo "Already installed"
    else yum install -y $PACKAGE 2>&1 | tee ~/packages/install.$PACKAGE.text
  fi
done

The instructions at this point are to install PHP 5.6, but PHP 7.2 is already on the system. PHP 7.2 is largely compatible with 5.6 (PHP 6 was developed but never relased; changes were either backported into 5.6 or rolled forward into a re-write that became PHP 7.) Here’s hoping nothing breaks in FreePBX due to the newer PHP, since I need PHP 7 for pi-hole.

Install nodejs from the nodesource repository

curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | bash -
yum install -y nodejs

Install PHP Console_GetOpt

PACKAGE=php-pear; yum install -y $PACKAGE 2>&1 | tee ~/packages/install.$PACKAGE.text
pear install Console_Getopt
--> pear/Console_Getopt is already installed and is the same as the released version 1.4.2

Download Asterisk source files. I chose to install Asterisk 16, which is the latest version and is supported by FreePBX.

cd /var/tmp
wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/libpri/libpri-current.tar.gz
wget -O jansson.tar.gz https://github.com/akheron/jansson/archive/v2.11.tar.gz
wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-16-current.tar.gz

The instructions at this point are to install DAHDI, but that wasn’t needed for my setup because DAHDI is used to talk to analogue telephony cards, and my setup is SIP only.

Compile and install jansson

cd /var/tmp
tar xzf jansson.tar.gz
cd $(ls -ld jansson* | awk '/^d/{print $9}')
(autoreconf -i && ./configure --libdir=/usr/lib64 && make && make install) 2>&1 | jtime | tee build.text

Unpack Asterisk and remove unneeded packages from contrib/scripts/install_prereq

cd /var/tmp
tar xzf asterisk*.tar.gz
ASTERISK_DN="$(ls -ld asterisk* | awk '/^d/{print $9}')"
cd $ASTERISK_DN
cd contrib/scripts
mv install_prereq install_prereq.orig
sed 's/^\(.*\)jansson-devel /\1/
  s/^\(.*\)postgresql-devel /\1/
  #s/^\(.*\)unixODBC-devel /\1/     # This one is commented out for now
  s/^\(.*\)radcli-devel /\1/
  s/^\(.*\)freetds-devel /\1/
' install_prereq.orig >install_prereq
RC=$?
[ $RC == 0 ] && chmod +x install_prereq
cd ../..

Install Asterisk pre-requisite packages

set -o pipefail
[ $RC == 0 ] && contrib/scripts/install_prereq install 2>&1 | jtime | tee build.1.install_prereq.text
RC=$?
# (Above step installed 37 packages and 60 additional dependent packages)
if [ $RC == 0 ]; then
  ./configure --prefix=/opt/$ASTERISK_DN --with-pjproject-bundled 2>&1 |
    jtime | tee build.2.configure.text
  RC=$?
fi
[ $RC == 0 ] && contrib/scripts/get_mp3_source.sh 2>&1 | jtime | tee build.3.get_mp3_source.text

The install_prereq step installed PostgreSQL, which I’m not sure is needed since Asterisk can use MariaDB and sqlite3.

Configure Asterisk using menuselect
```
[ -t 1 ] || exit    # Exit if stdout is redirected
make menuselect     # Note we're not redirecting stdout
```
Most options are good as-is, but some need to be changed:
- Select Add-ons > format_mp3
- Select Applications > app-macro (in the deprecated section)
- In Call Detail Recording and Channel Event Logging, deselect any extended module mentioning _csv, _pgsql, _radius, or _tds (leave the core modules alone)
- For my initial build I also selected all the AGI Samples
- Select Core Sound Packaages > CORE-SOUNDS-EN-WAV
- Select Extras Sound Packages > EXTRA-SOUNDS-EN-WAV

Build and install Asterisk

set -o pipefail
make 2>&1 | jtime | tee build.4.make.text
[ $? == 0 ] && make install 2>&1 | jtime | tee build.5.make-install.text
[ $? == 0 ] && make samples 2>&1 | jtime | tee build.6.make-samples.text
[ $? == 0 ] && make basic-pbx 2>&1 | jtime | tee build.7.make-basic-pbx.text
[ $? == 0 ] && make config      # Sets up systemd; no output

Create symlinks. I put asterisk into /opt, but I want to have symlinks in the main file system. For example, /var/log/asterisk should point to /opt/asterisk/var/log/asterisk.

cd /opt
[ -d asterisk ] || ln -s $ASTERISK_DN asterisk
cd asterisk
find . -type d | grep -v asterisk | while read DIR
do
  [ -d $DIR/asterisk ] || continue
  DN="${DIR:2}"
  SOURCE_DN="/opt/asterisk/$DN/asterisk"
  SYMLINK_DN="/$DN/asterisk"
  [ "$DN" == 'include' ] && SYMLINK_DN="/usr/$DN/asterisk"
  #[ "$DN" == 'lib' ] && SYMLINK_DN="/lib64/asterisk"
  if [ ! -L $SYMLINK_DN ]; then
    echo "Symlink $SOURCE_DN to $SYMLINK_DN"
    ln -s $SOURCE_DN $SYMLINK_DN
  fi
  ls -ld $SYMLINK_DN
done
cd /opt/asterisk/sbin
for FILE in *; do
    echo "Symlink $PWD/$FILE to /usr/sbin/$FILE"
    ln -s $PWD/$FILE /usr/sbin/$FILE
done

Set ownership and permissions

chown -R asterisk:apache /opt/$ASTERISK_DN
chown -R apache:apache /var/lib/php
LOG_DN="/opt/asterisk/var/log/asterisk"
chgrp apache $LOG_DN; chmod 775 $LOG_DN; unset LOG_DN
#chown -R asterisk. /var/www/               # DON'T DO THIS

Update ldconfig

echo /opt/asterisk/lib >/etc/ld.so.conf.d/asterisk.conf
ldconfig -v 2>&1 | jtime | tee build.8.ldconfig.text

Installing FreePBX

Typically I prefer to learn the base product instead of relying on a GUI of some description to do the work for me. I make an exception for Asterisk, because it’s a large and complex product in its own right, and I invested a lot of time into learning FreePBX.

Note: If you build a shell script using these commands, you should start it with the following lines:

1
2
3

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -o pipefail

Also remove references to | jtime if you want pipe output frrom the script to jtime.

Set up database tables and permissions

echo "GRANT ALL ON asterisk.* TO asterisk@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'MGMyMWUxN2Y1'" | mysql
echo "GRANT ALL ON asteriskcdrdb.* TO asterisk@localhost" | mysql
echo "CREATE DATABASE asterisk; CREATE DATABASE asteriskcdrdb" | mysql

Fix up /etc/asterisk.conf to prevent the FreePBX install from failing

cd /etc/asterisk
awk '/\[directories\]/ { sw = 1 }; sw { print }
  /^[[:space:]]*$/ { sw = 0 }' asterisk.conf.old >asterisk.conf.new
cat asterisk.conf >>asterisk.conf.new
mv asterisk.conf.old asterisk.conf.older
mv asterisk.conf asterisk.conf.old
mv asterisk.conf.new asterisk.conf

Install expect

PACKAGE=expect; yum install -y $PACKAGE 2>&1 | tee ~/packages/install.$PACKAGE.text

Download FreePBX itself (see downloads page, in the section titled FreePBX Manual/Tarball Install)

cd /var/tmp
wget http://mirror.freepbx.org/modules/packages/freepbx/freepbx-14.0-latest.tgz
tar xzf freepbx-14.0-latest.tgz
FREEPBX_VER="$(awk 'match($0,/<version>([^<]+)/,a){print a[1]; exit}' freepbx/module.xml)"
if [ "$FREEPBX_VER" ]
then
    FREEPBX_DN="freepbx-$FREEPBX_VER"; unset FREEPBX_VER
    mv freepbx $FREEPBX_DN
    RC=0
else
    RC=1
fi

Set up an expect script for installing FreePBX

#!/bash
cat <<-EOF | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*//; s/\\t/\t/g' >/r/install-freepbx.expect
    #!/usr/bin/expect -f
    set timeout 1
    spawn ./install
    expect -re "Database engine.*: ";\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Database name.*: ";\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "CDR Database name.*: ";\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Database username.*: ";\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tsend "asterisk\\r"
    expect "Database password: ";\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tsend "MGMyMWUxN2Y1\\r"
    expect -re "File owner user.*: ";\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tsend "apache\\r"
    expect -re "File owner group.*: ";\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tsend "asterisk\\r"
    expect -re "Filesystem location .* FreePBX files.*: ";\t\t\tsend "/var/www/freepbx\\r"
    expect -re "Filesystem location .* Asterisk config.*: ";\t\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Filesystem location for Asterisk modules.*: ";\t\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Filesystem location for Asterisk lib files.*: ";\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Filesystem location for Asterisk agi files.*: ";\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Location of the Asterisk spool directory.*: ";\t\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Location of the Asterisk run directory.*: ";\t\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Location of the Asterisk log files.*: ";\t\t\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Location of the FreePBX command line scripts.*: ";\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Location of the FreePBX .root. command line scripts.*: ";\tsend "\\r"
    expect -re "Location of the Apache cgi-bin executables.*: ";\tsend "/var/www/freepbx/cgi-bin\\r"
    expect -re "Directory for FreePBX html5 playback files.*: ";\tsend "\\r"
    set timeout -1
    expect eof
EOF
chmod +x /r/install-freepbx.expect

Install FreePBX

if [ "$FREEPBX_DN" ]; then
  cd $FREEPBX_DN

  # Start asterisk and fix up /opt/asterisk/var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl
  echo "----- Start asterisk and fix up /opt/asterisk/var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl"
  ./start_asterisk start
  chgrp apache /opt/asterisk/var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl
  chmod 775 /opt/asterisk/var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl

  mv /r/install-freepbx.expect .
  ./start_asterisk start
  ./install-freepbx.expect 2>&1 | jtime | tee install.text; RC=$?;
fi

Fix up the directory name in /var/www; fix some permissions

cd /var/www
mv freepbx $FREEPBX_DN
ln -s $FREEPBX_DN freepbx
chown apache:apache /etc/freepbx.conf
chown asterisk:apache /etc/amportal.conf

Set up an Apache configuration for FreePBX

CONF_FN="/etc/httpd/conf.d/freepbx.conf"
echo '# FreePBX' >$CONF_FN
echo 'Alias "/freepbx" "/var/www/freepbx/"' >>$CONF_FN
echo >>$CONF_FN
echo '<Directory "/var/www/freepbx/">' >>$CONF_FN
echo '    Options Indexes' >>$CONF_FN
echo '    AllowOverride None' >>$CONF_FN
echo '    Order allow,deny' >>$CONF_FN
echo '    Allow from all' >>$CONF_FN
echo '    Options FollowSymlinks' >>$CONF_FN
echo '    AlloowOverride All' >>$CONF_FN
echo '</Directory>' >>$CONF_FN
unset CONF_FN

Upgrade Asterisk modules to their most recent stable versions

cd /var/tmp
fwconsole ma upgradeall 2>&1 | jtime | tee fwconsole.ma.upgradeall.text

Install all available FreePBX modules

cd /var/tmp
/var/lib/asterisk/bin/module_admin installall 2>&1 | jtime | tee module_admin.installall.text

Restart apache
```
apachectl stop
sysstemctl start httpd
```

Issues with running FreePBX on a shared server

Running FreePBX as the asterisk user casues an error during setup from the web interface:
Execption: Trying to edit user asterisk, when I'm running as apache
in /var/www/freepbx/admin/libraries/BMO/Cron.class.php
Running FreePBX as the apache user causes an error during installation when the installer tries to talk to asterisk as the apache user and fails (it then recommends running asterisk as the apache user.)
–> One way to fix this is to modify the socket file /run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl to use group apache and group write permission (chmod 775.)
ln -s /opt/asterisk/var/run/asterisk /run/asterisk
chgrp apache /run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl && chmod 775 /run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl

Configuring FreePBX

Administrator user/password: taomir / ********
Notifications Email address: freepbx@groupbcl.ca

Building Asterisk and FreePBX on fenoras2

Compiling and installing Asterisk

Installing FreePBX

Issues with running FreePBX on a shared server

Configuring FreePBX

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Compiling and installing Asterisk

Installing FreePBX

Issues with running FreePBX on a shared server

Configuring FreePBX

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