The Ranting Thunder Of Thor

Sometimes it’s necessary to update your server. The operating system gets frequent updates. The ACID app_rpt also gets updates from time to time. It’s good to do these once in a while because not only do they fix some bugs, the operating system updates also frequently contain security fixes.

You’ll run into some problems with certain updates however. For this reason I recommend against unattended, automatic updates. Do these often but do them when you are at the machine and have some time to address things if it all doesn’t go so smoothly. Whenever the operating system kernel gets updated you’ll find that the ACID app_rpt code will need to be recompiled, at the very least. Updating that code to the latest version is a simple thing to do at that point.

Make sure you’ve backed up your configuration. Maybe I’ll cover that elsewhere, possibly talking about Webmin and how easy it is to set that up. For now I’ll say that, at the very least, you should copy your /etc/asterisk directory and save that copy somewhere off the server.

The Webmin start page will tell you if updates are available and, if so, will give you a link to perform them. Otherwise you can go to the System menu then go to Software Package Updates. If you don’t have Webmin, or prefer the command line, you can do this with a simple “yum update” command. Either way you take care of the CentOS operating system updates this way.

Once you’ve finished that, now let’s go get the latest ACID app_rpt code and compile it. Execute the following commands:
cd /usr/src
rm -rf astsrc
wget http://x.allstarlink.org/svn-trunk.tar.gz -O- | tar xzv
mv trunk astsrc
cd astsrc
make upgrade-acid

It has been my experience that once you’ve done this there is a failure of something called the zaptel modules that will prevent Asterisk from starting. Here’s what you do to recover from that:

cd /usr/src/astsrc/zaptel
./configure
make
make install
make config
modprobe zaptel
service zaptel start
service asterisk restart

That should get you back up and running. Now you’re running the latest code.

With Asterisk not running enter the command “modprobe zaptel”