Old Asterisk Release Wanting To Upgrade …

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Hello, I have been running Asterisk for the past 5+ years on RedHat and I never upgraded it before. All my Asterisk software is of the following release:
1) Asterisk 1.4.21.2
2) Libpri-1.4.4
3) Zaptel-1.4.11
I would like to move the OS to CentOS and then I thought I can at the same time ponder about upgrading Asterisk releases. However, I am bewildered by the myriad of different releases like 1.6, 1.8, 10.x, 11.x, 12.x, 13.x Can someone please give me some advice as to what release I should upgrade?
Or should I just stick to 1.4.x and just upgrade DAHDI?
Thanks. Regards, John Lee The contents of this e-mail are intended for the named addressee only. It contains information that may be confidential. Unless you are the named addressee or an authorized designee, you may not copy or use it, or disclose it to anyone else. If you received it in error please notify us immediately and then destroy it.

3 thoughts on - Old Asterisk Release Wanting To Upgrade …

  • 2014-04-15 10:37, Lee, John (Sydney) skrev:

    1.4, and 1.6-series have no support anymore. 1.8 is an LTS and have support currently, but this is also true for 11 and asterisk 11 will be supported longer.

    You have the full list here:
    https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Versions

    I would go for Asterisk 11 in your case. You will have to think of it more like a migration than an upgrade thought, as a lot has happened since asterisk 1.4.

    On a side-note, I still run some old installations with a current Dahdi
    + Asterisk 1.4.44 and they work great together. There is the non-support catch however.

    Good luck!

  • A little while back, I upgraded some systems from Asterisk 1.4 (I believe it was 1.4.29.1, and they were already running DAHDI), to 11. 11 made the most sense as far as it being a LTS release so it would be longer before being forced into a new version (as far as continued bug fixes and things), and I figured it would be more stable than 12.

    The upgrade wasn’t too difficult, even jumping several versions. I
    *strongly* suggest reading the various “UPGRADE-XX” files that come with the Asterisk source so you don’t get caught by any changes between versions. There are quite a few changes and each dialplan is different, so things that caught me would be different than what you might run into. Those upgrade text files are extremely useful in this case.

    Beyond that, I spent a lot of time migrating my config files. Since newer versions have newer / different options, I didn’t just keep my old files. For example, for SIP.CONF, I went through and modified the default settings in the new file to match what I needed, copied over my site-specific sip definitions from the old file, then double-checked everything. I did that with each file that I had modified (and in your case, you’ll have to go from zapata.conf to chan_dahdi.conf). It can be tedious, but it really only took me a day or two (taking time to double-check my changes). Overall, not a bad experience at all.

    Josh

  • Josh Metzger wrote:

    Awesome to hear that! Backwards compatibility is certainly at our forefront these days when doing development and we try our hardest to make the experience of upgrading as painless as possible from that perspective.

    Cheers,