Please remember I am quite new to Linux and am digging into an area that is lacking much documentation in LMCE. Any help is greatly appreciated as I'm struggling quite a bit with the learning curve.
That said, I have made quite a bit of progress and learned a lot already. Here is what I have so far.
The main reason I feel upgrading FreePBX is important to us is that the version we are running is no longer supported and will not get any updates. Once updating to the newer version updates will come automatically from whatever is upstream. Better to just get over this hurdle now while the rest of the LMCE packages are being migrated to standard Ubuntu packages.
We have to make sure that the apache2 user is owned by asterisk or we get permission errors on the agi modules. The following will correct this problem:
adduser www-data asterisk
chown www-data.asterisk -R /usr/share/asterisk
Then we have another error that is caused by default settings of PHP. The error is something to the effect of "You have magic_quotes_gpc enabled in your php.ini, http or .htaccess file which will cause errors in some modules. FreePBX expects this to be off and runs under that assumption". To fix this one you need to turn off magic_quotes_gpc in php.ini. This is only a reported error in more recent versions of FreePBX and was not checked in earlier versions at all.
We also get an error that the FOP server was not able to reload. After quite some digging around I found that the reason is because the FOP panel is not completely installed on our version. I looked briefly at installing it since the project is still maintened, but stopped there as the configuration seems to be a bit involed and there's a lot of other hurdles to overcome at this stage. Anyone else care to take this on?
I also found out that LMCE does not create it's extensions appropriately for newer versions of FreePBX and have yet to address that bit. What I found was the when saving changes to extensions I needed to rename the extensions as the LMCE naming convention of pl_ is not valid and the pl_ needed to be removed. Along with this I also had to add a dtmfmode to each of the extensions. They worked without the changes still, but are invalid according to FreePBX. I think it's probably better to just deal with this now and fall in line with the standards going forward.
Now the big one that has me stumped is that after the FreePBX upgrade LMCE has lost the ability to write changes from it's web admin and they are not reflected in FreePBX and no errors are ever reported. Admittedly I haven't had much time to dig deeper into this, but it seems to indicate to me that there is little to no error checking done when LMCE tries to write changes to the config files and that it is likely a permissions issue causing the inability to write. The problem is I have not yet figured out where to look for these config files being written and have no idea how to fix it. Anyone have some insight into this or suggestions to fix it?
That's pretty much all I've gotten so far. I've managed to upgrade and resolved some outstanding issues with previous installs, but opened up a can of new issues at the same time.