[asterisk-users] Upgrade to Asterisk 1.4 - it's one year's old!

[Duncan Turnbull]

We build and maintain 7 Asterisk boxes for our customers, I have 
recently moved 3 to 1.4. I also use iaxmodem and on the last one 1.4.14 
I was getting iax thread errors - which was reported as a bug in much 
earlier versions but apparently fixed.  When 1.4.15 came out (two days 
later) it solved this problem, for me at least. I didn't dig any further 
but it did moderate my confidence somewhat.

We run everything on ubuntu server 6.06 LTS and also use freepbx as the 
interface with some minor customisations. It works very well and we are 
now shifting some others to 1.4 but the issue is if anything goes wrong 
its too costly to fix, as part of maintenance we keep them uptodate. The 
main blocker for 1.4 was freepbx but now it supports 1.4 and seems to 
manage the transition really well.

However being a small self employed group of two the main reason to 
stick with what works is the risk of cost. We don't generally do major 
upgrades without charging but there isn't any seriously missing 
functionality yet, and the effort involved to be sure it will be hassle 
free is significant. The clients have to see value in the upgrade.

We also work with people still on version 1.0, because the risk of 
change to a working system is too high

This seems to be the same issue already mentioned but my take on it is 
most people can't cope with any risk on production machines unless there 
is some significant gain. Its been a year now, generally I would think 
that means its probably starting to become stable but a year isn't very 
long really. Give it another year and the new installs will mostly be 
1.4 and the migration process will be a lot more trusted. I don't think 
a year is really long enough to expect much more than where you are at. 
The debian stable, unstable, and testing model would be useful here, 
debian stable is so reliable it just rocks, if there was a version like 
that it would be fantastic (of course you trade access to the latest 
features for it) . We find ubuntu server a great balance between debian 
stability and getting the latest options.

Is there a performance analysis of 1.2 vs 1.4 around or a clear business 
analysis of the distinctions in value for each?

Cheers Duncan

Lyle Giese wrote:

> Olle E Johansson wrote:
>
>>>All I can say is with 1.6, if a change is made that causes something  
>>>that worked in 1.4 not to work in 1.6, please think twice, three  
>>>times or four times before making the change, or making the change  
>>>in such a way that it won't break dialplan stuff from 1.4.
>>>
>>>    
>>>
>>Our policy is to never remove any functionality between two versions.  
>>We replace the functionality with new functionality and print out  
>>warnings whenever you use the deprecated functions. We also add this  
>>to the documenation in the software and the UPGRADE.TXT file. So the  
>>functionality that you lost in 1.4 was old 1.0 functions that was  
>>marked as deprecated in 1.2 and removed in 1.4.
>>
>>We might want to be more informative about those changes. We need to  
>>make a clear list of things you need to start changing as a user of  
>>1.4 to prepare for lost functionality in 1.6. This information already  
>>exist, but should maybe be a bit more public.
>>
>>In some cases we do have to change in a dramatic way and can't  
>>preserve the old functionality to solve a bug in the software. This  
>>requires thorough discussion in the developer group and is something  
>>we really want to avoid at all costs. If this happens, it's clearly  
>>documented in the software.
>>
>>Thank you for your feedback, it's important to us.
>>
>>/O
>>
>>  
>>
> Along that this same line, I ran 1.0.something for a long time and it 
> was working just fine for my SOHO.  I had a channel bank to interface 
> pots lines from the local Telco and feed the analog phones in the 
> house.  Over time, I replaced most of those analog phones with SIP phones.
>
> An unfortunate incident caused us to lose that server and several sip 
> phones.  When I recovered enough to rebuild *, I tried 1.4 and it 
> would not compile completely and zaptel did not load properly.  I 
> download 1.2 and it worked with the same configs as 1.0, but the 
> quality was poor.  That was due to hardware issues.
>
> I purchased a new motherboard and rebuilt using a newer Asterisk 1.4 
> with the then current libpri and zaptel and the call quality came 
> back.  But I had a hard time with syntax changes.  Basically I was 
> jumping from 1.0.x to 1.4.x in one leap.
>
> My biggest gripe is that everything loaded and seemed to work.  A day 
> later we found this did not work and discovered a syntax change.  A 
> day later something else did not work, an other syntax change.  Why 
> isn't there some pre-processor to check the syntax of the config 
> files?  Would have saved me a whole bunch of time I didn't have to 
> spare and still don't.
>
> Lyle
> As it is syntax problems or changes are not noticed or logged until 
> Asterisk tries to execute them. If there is a chunk of code that is 
> only hit once a week???  It almost came to a point of scraping 
> Asterisk because of the push back from the family.
>
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