The Asterisk.org Development team has just announced the latest Asterisk Release Schedule. This should provide the initial motivation to start the process of upgrading your Asterisk PBX system.

However, in my experience migrating from Asterisk v1.2 to v1.4 does present itself with a few challenges.

For example, the CLI commands that were deprecated are now removed in v1.4, syntax in extensions.conf has improved and other configuration options have been added or modified.

In many cases backwards compatibility has not been possible. However the new commands/options are more powerful and/or intuitive for the Asterisk administrator, which makes Asterisk easier to learn, understand and manage.

If you are still running Asterisk v1.2 or earlier, you should consider upgrading soon. As the announcement states, “…you should start considering a plan for upgrading your servers to Asterisk 1.4…some time after Asterisk 1.6 is available, Asterisk 1.2 will become officially deprecated and no longer supported with fixes of any kind from the core Asterisk development community.”

In order to have a successful deployment, proper planning and testing are paramount. I don’t know about you, but the receiving and placing of telephone calls are two very important activities in both my personal and business environments, especially since I run Asterisk both at home and at work. Therefore, I cannot afford to have a seemingly simple software upgrade cause my phones to stop functioning, no matter what.

The first step is to create a migration plan, then test, test, test. I recommend having completely separate hardware to setup a complete environment for testing, however this is not necessarily always feasible - say for scalability testing.

In an upcoming article, I will document the various changes and improvements that I found between Asterisk v1.2 and v1.4 and the steps I take to ensure a successful migration. Please comment if you have any specific situations that you would like to see covered.

Stay Tuned…

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