IP04 Adventures - Day 4

I haven't had a lot of time to play with the IP04 recently; I've had some website changes on my mind, and that took most of my energies. However, I did get to play a little, today.

I left off with a dialplan on the incoming phone line that would ring the IP04 extensions, and if no one picked up, play a soundbite and hang up. I had loosely tested this dialplan; it did distribute incoming calls to the three extension ports, and did play the soundbite if no one answered. But, since my last testing was done several days ago, I couldn't remember if I had actually tested picking up an extension to receive an incoming call.

So, with one extension line plugged in, and the FXO port plugged into my PSTN line, I used my cell to call my home. The extension rang, as I expected, and when I picked it up, I could hear the sounds from my cell. So, yes, that did work, just fine, thank you.

With my fiddling around with the users.conf and zapata.conf files earlier on, I decided to try a test without users.conf at all. I renamed the file (so as not to lose the contents), and created an empty users.conf, and used the Asterisk commandline to reload everything. A zap show channels showed that all channel assignments were now coming from the zapata.conf file. I can dial out by dialing extension 1, and receive calls just as I had with the previous tests. But, this isn't the right way to handle dial out; the proper way was with the dialplan that users.conf had enforced. So, back goes users.conf for a while.

Now, that [numberplan-local] dialplan in extensions.conf needs to change. It recognizes 9 as the "outside line" signal, but only accepts seven digit local phone numbers. In my area-code, we use ten-digit local phone numbers, so I have to add three more digits to the dialplan. A quick edit of extensions.conf gives me


[globals]
trunk_1 = Zap/g1
trunk_2 = IAX2/trunk_2
; next global added by Lew for altered numberplan-local dialing
zport1 = Zap/1

...

[numberplan-local]
ignorepat => 9
include => default
comment => Local Calling
;exten = _9NXXXXXX,1,Macro(trunkdial,${trunk_1}/${EXTEN:1})
exten = _9NXXNXXXXXX,1,Macro(trunkdial,${zport1}/${EXTEN:1})


and a quick "dialplan reload" in the Asterisk commandline gives me full local dialing, as expected, on the extension ports. Yes, I left the trunk_1 and trunk_2 globals alone, and commented out the original 7-digit regexp; you never know when you might need something from the original setup, so better to leave them there than to remove them.

That's enough playing for tonight. I've got other things to do, and I can pick this up tomorrow.