As most people would have noticed, I've been conspicuous by my absence recently. This has been due to a couple of things that have been happening IRL, and has made my spare time pretty much non-existent. Unfortunately for me, that spare time was the time I was using to do FreePBX work.

I apologise for the total lack of involvement I've had over the past couple of months, and I'd really like to publically thank Philippe for carrying the torch while I've been unavailable. But, I do have a good reason, and I should fill everyone in on what's been going on and where I've been.

Just a quick heads up - the hosting company that USED to host freepbx.org has been down for a couple of days due to Level3 cutting them off. They're in the process of organising new data pipes, but for the moment this means that Aussie Voip and a couple of other sites are down temporarily. You can keep up with what's going on at their web site. I'm still away from the office, so I can't really do terribly much. It seems that everything will be up at the end of the week, so fingers crossed.

We seem to have now got most of the bugs out of the 2.2 branch, so just to bring everything up to date, I've just released 2.2.1, to keep everything nice and fresh. For those that are subscribed to the sourceforge announcements, you would have noticed TWO announcement. That's because I stuffed up, but I did that BEFORE this announcment. So if you're reading this, and you haven't downloaded 2.2.1 yet, it's all OK.

If you can read this, then congrats. You're looking at the new Xeon server. It's much MUCH faster than the old machine, and hopefully should be a lot more reliable! I did some minor load testing on it, and it can handle about 20 times the load that was killing the old machine. Excellent! However, we're still only 2/3rds of the way to a years worth of hosting, so for anyone who hasn't donated yet, please see if you can! Thanks!

For anyone using Enum trunks in 2.2.0, they would be unhappy to find that it's giving them a wierd authentication error. Whoops. I've got a check back-to-front in the extensions.conf file. It's a really easy fix, edit line 428 of /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf and put a "!" before the = sign. The line should read (when fixed): exten => s,1,GotoIf($["${ARG3}" <strong>!</strong>= ""]?PASSWD:NOPASSWD); arg3 is pattern password Note that I've put the ! in bold so you can see where it's meant to be.

After a long and drawn out test, beta, and rc cycle, I beleve that we finally have a really REALLY good freePBX release. Since we started on the 2.2 branch, 244 bugs or feature requests have been fixed or implemented. Not only that, we've also changed the GUI, added a pile of new features, and also changed the way a few things work. We're all pretty happy with it, and we've have even more new stuff lined up for 2.3. Please note that if you are upgrading, there's been a couple of significant changes to the way things are done.

Well. The hard part is, anyway. The feeding and entertaining of flocks of family and relations who decend upon us. Actually, it wasn't us this year, it was Tharyn's parents who were doing the feeding and entertaining. So we got out of it quite easily. Before I continue on into far more freePBX related stuff, I must boast about how cool a wife I have.

I'll update this post shortly, but RC2 has a major bug that breaks significant functionality. I'll update this post when RC3 is out. Update: OK, SourceForge have the new version, as does mirror.freepbx.org. I'll be updating all the wiki pages. I apologise for the inconvenience. 8-(

Happy Christmas to all, Santa has come early and given you all nice fresh cut of Release Candidate 2! With 112 more bug fixes since RC1, this is looking pretty smooth. As usual, there are still some minor issues, but they're mainly modules that we can update later. Core is looking pretty smooth!