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(Original post February 14 2021 updated)
By default, ChanSpy, a supervisor function that allows you to monitor
other peoples calls, is enabled and can be used by anyone, yes, anyone, who's phone is logged in to a FreePBX system that has this feature enabled.
Sangoma don't allow you to secure it out of the box, instead, they try sell you some commercial module (that's about AU$145) that allegedly sets a PIN. But you can do it for free!
We all (hopefully) backup our PBX's - our config files, databases, even system audio and logs, some of this can be backed up hourly, daily, or weekly, so in all likelihood, you will have at least two backup processes probably more, but where do you back them up to?
Local storage? It's fair to say nearly everyone uses this, but is that the only place you have them? What if your disks fail? A lot of good those backups are now you can't access them!
FreePBX, being a front end to Asterisk, allows setting multiple time periods under a single Time Group, usually for public Holidays and such, we call this Holidays - I know, so original
This article concentrates on Queensland, in particular Brisbane, Public Holidays, since only a few holidays vary between states, it will be easy for you to change to suite yours if you need to, likewise international readers, where many don't observe Show Days, ANZAC Day, or Easter.
Playing music on hold (MoH) on your phone system whilst your caller is waiting to connect to the person or department they are after, or whilst someone ducks off to get some information, is a given these days, no-one wants to sit there and listen to silence, or nothing but the sound of keyboard tapping for 5 minutes.
Am I still connected? Did they forgot about me? Hrmm... is this thing still working? C'mon aren't you done yet?
TPG and ABB (Aussie Broadband) need no introduction, but the shite way one of them does business and treats its customers is the chalk to the others cheese.
Long time socials followers, would be well aware of the frustrations and problems I've had to tolerate with TPG. I took up their service in 2010 as a static-IP account, yet after about 6 years, TPG forgot the meaning of static-IP and changed our IP - without notice - not once, but three times. This is a problem when your IP Address is in many firewall ACL's to perform remote management.
Configuring FreePBX to use a VoIP provider is usually simple and quick, but sometimes there's always one of the bunch that wants to be different in how they expect you to configure your Trunk, and Aussie Broadband (affectionately known as Aussie, or ABB) is one of them.
With ABB doing things differently, you'll find the usual way of setting up a SIP trunk in FreePBX wont work, and you'll probably go half insane trying to work out why.