As I wrote a couple of days, I’m currently in the process of evaluating the PIKA WARP appliance. As I already said before, the PIKA WARP isn’t a real PBX, but actually a framework for building PBX type appliances.

For me, the entire evaluation process is more or less a process of trial and error, trying to figure out how the box is built, both from the software side and both from the build-tools provided with the appliance.

The process of flashing the new FreePBX based images wasn’t much of a hassle, actually, after more or less fucking up the box a couple of times, I became fairly handy with both the warploader and uboot tools, used to flash the onboard flash memory with a new boot image. After flashing the FreePBX about 3 times, I got it to come up right on my browser window, which produced the following screen:

PIKA FreePBX Screen

PIKA FreePBX Screen

Now, it was fairly clear to me that MySQL (a mandatory component of FreePBX) isn’t a shoe in for the WARP appliance, after all, for an appliance it would be a blowtware. So, FreePBX here comes with SQLite, which on the surface should provide for similar functionality. Having worked with SQLite in the past, I knew for fact that some portions of FreePBX will not work – who am I kidding? if they would work it would be the most amazing thing I’ve seen a long time.

Mainly, this is caused by variations between the SQL code and various table management that FreePBX imposes on the FreePBX database structure, when installing or upgrading new or existing modules. For example, trying to go about and install the FreePBX IVR module yields the following error:

FreePBX error on WARP appliance

FreePBX error on WARP appliance

Well, that’s understandable – basically means that the unit isn’t yet fully useable with FreePBX – but we are getting there I guess, after all, rome wasn’t built in a single day.