One of the Many Reasons I Hate FreePBX

One of the Many Reasons I Hate FreePBX

January 21, 2020 0 By Edrick Smith
Yet another hosed upgrade

For whatever reason it seems 9 out of 10 times FreePBX just absolutely loves to bork up the upgrade process with trying to update modules. Mind you this is also after a complete day of their Portal System for Provisioning Devices and Phones being down along with their Support Portal. You can’t even call their technical support due to the fact they make you submit a Helpdesk ticket before calling and providing a ticket ID number to be connected on the phone.

It’s amazing for a corporate company as big as Sangoma is how buggy the FreePBX architecture still is and how much of a nightmare it can be getting support by them.

Now mind you usually you can fix this borked up SysAdmin Web GUI by SSHing into the system and running

fwconsole ma updateall

This will then force the system to go through the upgrade process of the modules via a terminal session. But for a system that you should be able to do a standard module check / upgrade from the WebGUI and not risk hosing / taking down a production environment. This is a common occurrence I see almost all the time on multiple machines that are literally running everything factory. So there’s no customization or add on modules beyond the standard Sangoma provided ones and it STILL breaks.

However fun fact sometimes if not more often than not with FreePBX something even as simple as the “fix” doesn’t work right. After running that the module at hand still kept crapping out. Thanks impart to Sangomas outage.

 Tried to update DDNS with {"deploymentname":"","hash":"","publish_ddns":"true","endpoin  
  t_proto":"http","endpoint_port":84,"distro_version":"12.7.6-1910-1.sng7","failsafe_version":"1.0.0.0"}, crashed with {"result":false,"message":"System currentl  
  y under maintenance. You can check the current status of our applications in the following URL: <a href='https:\/\/status.sangoma.com\/' target='_blank'>https:  
  \/\/status.sangoma.com\/<\/a>"} 

As you can see here

System currently under maintenance. You can check the current status of our applications in the following URL:

So basically due to the outage their module is failing to upgrade which has completely hosed the PBX environment until the module can be upgraded. As you can see here from the forums in prior posts, I’m not the only one with reservations against FreePBX