Re: Comfort & Asterisk

["Patrick Lidstone" <patrick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx, "Graham Kiff" <graham.kiff@w...>
wrote:
> Guys
>
> I've posted here, because this is covering 3 aspects of HA, and not
> specific to either asterisk, comfort or xAP.
>
> I've got Asterisk up and running fine now, but am have trouble gaining
> access to comfort internally via asterisk.
> Has anyone implemented the dial * via asterisk to access comfort?

This depends on your setup. How is your exchange line connected to
asterisk? In most configurations, you should be able to dial <outside
line access digit>, * and connect to comfort. (e.g. 9*), provided your
asterisk dial plan recognises that as a valid number.

> Also is there a way when comfort rings the phones after the door bell
> press that asterisk could set the cid to "door bell"??

This is actually trickier than it looks. A quick hack would be to
assume that any call that doesn't pass CLI is actually "doorbell"
and
to set CIDNAME within asterisk accordingly. This will almost certainly
be misleading for international, payphone and withheld calls, as many
FXO interfaces don't pass these correctly and leave them blank.

Another option would be to intercept the xAP-comfort connector
doorbell event, and use that set the caller id within asterisk. Not
terribly straight forward, and it would rely on comfort raising the
doorbell event before ringing starts - I've never timed this, and
there could be a race condition.

Yet another option would be to connect comfort to a dedicated FXO
interface (and tell comfort that it is behind a pbx). Access to
comfort would then be <comfort extension number>*, and incoming calls
on that FXO would always be from the doorbell.

Finally - probably the optimal solution: I think the ring cadence on
comfort doorbell is different from that of a normal incoming call
IIRC? If so, then you could use asterisk's incoming call distinctive
ringing filtering - see
http://voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk%20ZAP%20channels
,
about two-thirds down the page. You would hive off comfort doorbell
ring to its own context, and then explicitly set the CIDNAME and
CIDNUMBER to read "Doorbell".


> One last question (I think) - I'm using the latest version of
> Asterisk@Home cd, but how do I enable xAP?

I really must write this up... Sorry.

Patrick