 I want to do some follow up on free PBX and I'm still running it. It's been just about, it'll be just about a year next month that we installed it and moved everything away from we were previously ring central and I have no ill will towards ring central. People always think if you don't like a product or you switch from a product because you hated it, it just wasn't really a fit for us anymore. I wanted the flexibility you get with free PBX. I've always been kind of fascinated by it but didn't didn't have enough confidence to dive into it and switch my business over to it until I got a better understanding of it. And I did a video together with Chris from Crosstalk Solutions. He is a free PBX expert. That's one of the specialties of his company is doing free PBX design and installs hence why I reached out to the best when you need help setting this up. So Chris helped me set it up. Like I said, I'll leave a link below to that video. It's going to be more in-depth. This is kind of a follow-up video on what it's like running it a year later, what we've learned, what works, what doesn't work and overall I'm really, really happy with it. Now, first off, free PBX is free. It is open source but they do sell add-on modules, paid support, hosted versions, et cetera, et cetera. And we have thought about and we may still be switching to a hardware version of this because running it virtualized has not really been the perfect scenario. And the reason why is if I even want to reboot the systems and I know I can pass them, I did a video about passing things live because we have a pair of servers on there. But I've received phones being absolutely critical. So anytime I want to do some maintenance on our stack, the phones aren't available. Now, that doesn't sound like a big deal to some people, but for us, we think of phones as a very critical way our clients reach us 24-7 in case of emergencies. So I'm always nervous whenever I have to pause it and like, I can get notices for the phone system. If someone calls wallets down, but obviously this can create some issues. The other issue I ran into is I've been running it virtualized the entire time, but I did run into a strange problem with the latest version. So after there was a big version update to the underlying OS, I started having some call dropping issues. And I did some digging yesterday and found this apparently running the XE daemon, which is the tool set used for the Zen Orchestra, Zen daemon to give functionality inside the hypervisor so it can see things like memory. If you notice now, too, it doesn't see the memory usage. It just says there's just two gigs of RAM versus it would actually understand and can allocate memory back and forth. Anyways, loading the Zen tools on there has worked for the last year until this latest update, then it just has weird issues with networking. So the networking would kind of randomly have some dropouts. All they did was uninstall those tools and it works perfectly fine again. So that's the only problem I've had running it virtualized. But as I stated before, Chris doesn't necessarily recommend it virtualized. And there's reasons not to. It's not that your mileage may vary, but if you run it directly on hardware, you've eliminated a lot of little potential problems. So it's more of a troubleshooting thing of you want it closer to the bare metal so you don't have really any issues with it. And they do support if you need that HA setup, you can get bare metal boxes that have HA. My plan is to keep it running on hardware and because FreePBX has infrequently changed for us, we'll keep a cold spare sitting on here. So if ever we had a hardware failure, we'll have FreePBX configured and ready to rock and roll that we can fire up inside of our virtualization stack. So it's kind of my plan for that. Now, what phones are we using with this? Let's talk about that a little bit. Speaking of phones, mine went off. So the phones we're using are a combination of things. First off, in the office, we're wandering around with these Yealink phones. And I love these. These things we've had for a couple of years now. We use these even with Ring Central. I'm holding one right now. It's kind of like the easy go-to simple. We can wander around the office because we're not always sitting at our desk phones. And you get a base station, a couple of them. And I thought about doing a review more in depth specifically on these Yealinks. We've really been impressed with them. Matter of fact, even the ones that are a couple of years old, same original batteries, and we forget to put these on a charger, they're just laying around the office in different spots and they seem to last for days. Like, I'm just super impressed with the battery, you know. When we are at our desks. And I don't really like running Zoiper on the desktop, but you can. The reason why is I like it running on my smartphone. And the reason for running it on my smartphone is because it's just a convenient thing. That way if some noise or something plays on my computer, there's never any worry or interference with it. So also if I want to get it from my desk, it's convenient. So Zoiper's been my go-to system. And when we're out of the office, all of us have Zoiper on our phones. So we just VPN back in. We have a specific VPN. We load on our phones with open VPN and PF sense to a separate network that only attaches to the phone system on the phones. We can leave it open with Zoiper and it works great. So when I'm out of the office, I can make calls to the extensions. And no problem. I will comment too, in terms of intensity of usage, we've only got these four CPUs and two gigs of RAM. And this is a look at for like the last seven days. Probably this is when I was loading those updates right here, we hit like the 5% mark. FreePBX is really lightweight. So even, you know, we only have about six people in the office making phone calls. And in some of us out of the office, but it never really hits more than a couple percent CPUs. It's pretty low in terms of, you know, how much bandwidth it needs and how much processor time it needs. You know, administratively, it's been pretty easy to administer. I really haven't had any problems. Matter of fact, once you take the time and you know, Chris's videos are really helpful. I think I've watched all of them on there. Adding extensions, adding a couple little options on there have been actually kind of fun. We've even played with some of the text to speech. One of the things, if you press the wrong number, a automated voice will say you have been, you have pressed an invalid option system and it will now attempt to connect you with a human. It's easy and fun to play with this because it's so extensible of a thing. You can get lost in all the features on here, the calendars, the events, how the call flows go, the queues and things like that. It's fun, it's a little daunting at first. But once you get into using it, it's actually a pretty amazing system for how all that works. Now, the last thing I'll talk about is some of the bandwidth and a lot of people ask me about what are the ports you forwarded and how much bandwidth does it use and do you need traffic shaping? Well, I'm gonna recommend traffic shaping as a whole and I have a few videos on very specifically like CattleQ is very helpful in PF Sense running this. Yeah, when it comes to traffic shaping, there's not much you need to do. I just ran the wizard in PF Sense to create some queues for some of our different networks and not a big deal there. And I do have CattleQ enabled, I do recommend that because overall your internet connection is better when you set up something like CattleQ to help manage the bandwidth. And I'll refer to Mark Ferman's video has really good explainer of how queuing works with packets and networks. It's an excellent video and he does cover it on the basis of PF Sense. Now let's talk about the actual connections and ports. What do you need forwarded? Well, nothing. The hosting company we're using is vitality. I'm gonna blur out some of my public IP addresses here but what this has set up and how this works is free PBX can use NAT. No special rules, no weird routing. No, I have to forward a bunch of ports and open things up on the firewall at all. It reaches out to vitality. It makes the connection and it's very similar if you've seen my video or talked about how ports, how they open up and brings it back in because it's initiated internally on the network, it brings it back in to the network. So by doing this, you don't have to open a porch and you see it's just port 5060. And so what happens when you make a phone call? Now what it's doing right here is this is it's maintaining the connection. So it just keeps the connection between the internal and external to vitality are hosting. So I'm gonna make a phone call here and call the office and you'll see how a new connection gets initiated. And here you go. It's if you would go on to say our office is closed. So now it initiated more connections and if you make more phone calls, you get a few more connections but this does not require any ports because it's maintaining a connection to vitality. Vitality says, I need another one. It's talking back and forth through the firewall but not based on specific rules. And like I said, this is a important aspect of, this is the way I like these things configured. And this varies. Some providers, as I learned, helping someone out with a networking issue, some providers don't support this. I don't have a list of who does and who doesn't but at least I can tell you that using vitality for a phone service, we've been happy with them. We haven't had any outages or any problems in the last year with it. So it's gone really well and they do support this configuration and I've had no headaches at all. And we have a few other clients using vitality by sheer coincidence and with free PBX and it works fine for them as well. So don't be afraid to try out free PBX. It is commercial and excellent and I don't have time because I know someone's going to mention because one of the ones we did look at but we decided against was the 3CX system. I don't think it's a bad system. I have some friends that told me it's absolutely excellent. I am aware of it and a few other ones out there but we decided that the flexibility and open source nature and just the Linuxy nature of running the free PBX system and all the little customizations you could do made it a fun toy to play with and it turns out to be an absolutely rock solid, stable, excellent system. Now the last comment I'll make as I did mention being I'm probably going to switch to buying a hardware. When you get their hardware you get all the licensing with the appliances and I say licensing you're like, hold on, wasn't it open source? Yeah, what they have add-on modules you can get. These free PBX, this is the phone system 40 and I think they have a smaller 25 on the Sangoma side. These allow a lot of the extra features that they're adding on so those little add-ons. One of them I've been looking at is they have like a soft phone, web browser phone and some new updates that I think are paid for modules. So I am like I said, thinking about moving to a hardware but it has worked great inside of virtualization but your mileage may vary and I'm using it in Zen server so I don't know if it will work in whatever other virtualization platform you're using. Do some playing, do some testing with it. As long as your virtualization platform is set up stable and properly and you have proper traffic management on your network, you should be able to run it there but like I said, your mileage may vary but like I said, this is my follow-up, free PBX. Still happy with it, still running it a year later. No intention of switching matter of fact. We have more ideas, more fun things we wanna play with and if you really wanna dive deep into free PBX, check out Chris and Crossock's channel. There's a plethora of videos on there from getting started to some more of the advanced features that it supports. All right, thanks. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. 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