RE: Re: Comfort & Asterisk

["Graham Kiff" <graham.kiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the response Patrick

My line setup is as follows:
BT Line -> Comfort Tel In
Comfort Tel Out -> Asterisk (via FXO)
Asterisk -> POTS (via FXS) & IP Phones

I have setup a dial plan for accessing Comfort (9*), however there seems
to be some sort of timing issue, as Comfort doesn't recognise the *
digit after the line is seized - all I hear is the PSTN dial tone.  If I
then dial digits, after a few seconds I get a "BT voice" saying
number
not recognised.

In respect to the door bell CID.  I tried using distinctive ring, but it
appears that you cannot use UK CLID with Distinctive Ring.  Basically I
can use them separately with no problems.  As soon as I turn on the
following CLID setting "cidstart=polarity", distinctive ring
stops
working and only reports a ring pattern of "0,0,0" whereas
without this
setting it reports "246,97,0".  Therefore I'm going to raise this
on the
asterisk list to see if it can be resolved.

Cheers
Graham

-----Original Message-----
From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Patrick Lidstone
Sent: 10 September 2005 14:45
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_d] Re: Comfort & Asterisk


--- 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