The fix is to run the following through terminal:
Tried the fix tonight and it worked! Thanks, @wardmundy :).. Just for reference for anyone else... here's the code you need to run.
amportal kill
chown -R asterisk:asterisk /var/run/asterisk
sed -i '/END INIT INFO/a AST_USER="asterisk"\nAST_GROUP="asterisk"' /etc/init.d/asterisk
sed -i 's|exit 0|/usr/local/sbin/amportal restart\nexit 0|' /etc/rc.local
amportal restart
sed -i 's|;runuser|runuser|' /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf
sed -i 's|;rungroup|rungroup|' /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf
rebootIf 'amportal kill' does not work, then 'amportal stop' should do the trick and continue with the rest of the commands. Hopefully this helps anybody out there 
