GoAutoDial 4 Installation, and How It Compares to ViciBox

GoAutoDial and ViciBox both package the same underlying software. VICIdial is the application; these are two different distributions of it, with different installers, different management interfaces and different update cadences.

People often pick one without understanding the distinction, then hit its limitations later. This post covers the GoAutoDial install and gives an honest comparison.

What GoAutoDial Actually Is

GoAutoDial is CentOS with VICIdial pre-installed, plus GoAutoDial’s own administration interface layered over the standard VICIdial admin. The telephony is unchanged — same Asterisk, same VICIdial perl daemons, same database schema.

What differs is the surface. The GoAutoDial GUI is a cleaner, more modern interface for common tasks: creating campaigns, managing users, viewing reports. Under it, the original VICIdial admin remains available, and you will need it, because the GoAutoDial interface does not expose every setting.

Installing GoAutoDial 4

Download the ISO from goautodial.org and write it:

dd if=goautodial-4-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress
sync

Boot the installer. It is the CentOS installer with a preconfigured kickstart, so it runs largely unattended:

1. Language and keyboard
2. Timezone — set accurately, for the same reasons as any VICIdial install
3. Disk — accept the automatic layout unless you have specific requirements
4. Root password

It partitions, installs and reboots without further prompts.

First Boot

Log in as root. Configure networking — GoAutoDial 4 is CentOS 7 based, so this is the traditional layout:

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

BOOTPROTO=static
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=192.168.1.60
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=192.168.1.1
DNS1=1.1.1.1

systemctl restart network
ip a

Set the hostname and confirm time sync:

hostnamectl set-hostname dialer2
systemctl enable --now ntpd
ntpq -p

Running the Setup Script

goautodial-installer

Or on some builds:

/usr/local/bin/goautodial-setup

It asks for the server IP and database details, writes /etc/astguiclient.conf, loads the schema and starts the daemons. Same work as vicibox-install, different wrapper.

Verify afterwards:

screen -ls
asterisk -rx "core show version"
mysql -u cron -p1234 asterisk -e "SELECT server_ip FROM servers;"

Logging In

Two interfaces, two URLs:

• GoAutoDial GUI: http://your-ip/ — default admin / goautodial
• VICIdial admin: http://your-ip/vicidial/admin.php — default 6666 / 1234

Change both immediately. Two sets of default credentials on one box is twice the exposure.

Everything from the standard hardening applies here as well: AMI credentials in manager.conf, MySQL accounts, the recordings path, SSH keys, firewall scoped to your carriers.

Where the GUI Helps, and Where It Does Not

So you do not escape the VICIdial admin. You get a friendlier layer for daily operations on top of it.

The Comparison

	GoAutoDial 4	ViciBox
Base OS	CentOS 7	openSUSE Leap
Extra GUI	Yes	No
Update cadence	Slower, less frequent	Tracks VICIdial releases closely
Community support	Smaller	Larger, and it is where the developers are
Cluster support	Workable	Better documented
Underlying software	Identical VICIdial	Identical VICIdial

Two points deserve emphasis.

Which to Choose

Migrating Between Them

Because the underlying VICIdial is the same, moving is a database and recordings migration rather than a rebuild:

# On the source
mysqldump -u root -p --single-transaction asterisk | gzip > vicidial.sql.gz
rsync -az /var/spool/asterisk/monitorDONE/ newserver:/var/spool/asterisk/monitorDONE/

# On the destination
gunzip < vicidial.sql.gz | mysql -u root -p asterisk

Then update the servers table with the new IP, reconfigure carriers, and run:

/usr/share/astguiclient/ADMIN_keepalive_ALL.pl --restart

Check VICIdial versions match closely before doing this. Restoring a database from a much older or newer VICIdial into a mismatched install causes schema problems that are tedious to unpick. If the versions differ, upgrade the source first, then migrate.

Leads, lists, dispositions, users and historical reporting all survive the move intact.