Asterisk hints, and reloading

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I’m ecstatic to say I have asterisk running great. What a cool open source project!

I’ve been working on getting the ‘Buddies/Presence’ on my polycom 501 phones working. I was able to get this configured and running fine.

There is only one major problem. If I ‘reload’ from the asterisk console, which I am doing often for minor extensions tweeks, etc, my hints lose all their watchers. And none of the phones seem to re register as a watcher unless you full on reboot them.

Anyone else have this problem?

So to summarize, I start up asterisk, restart all my phones and I see:

asterisk*CLI> show hints -= Registered Asterisk Dial Plan Hints =- 121 : SIP/121 State:Idle Watchers 6 120 : SIP/120 State:Idle Watchers 6 119 : SIP/119 State:Idle Watchers 6 112 : SIP/112 State:Idle Watchers 6 111 : SIP/111 State:Idle Watchers 6 104 : SIP/104 State:InUse Watchers 6 102 : SIP/102 State:Idle Watchers 6 101 : SIP/101 State:Idle Watchers 6

However when I then run:

and then I get:

asterisk*CLI> show hints -= Registered Asterisk Dial Plan Hints =- 121 : SIP/121 State:Idle Watchers 0 120 : SIP/120 State:Idle Watchers 0 119 : SIP/119 State:Idle Watchers 0 112 : SIP/112 State:Idle Watchers 0 111 : SIP/111 State:Idle Watchers 0 104 : SIP/104 State:InUse Watchers 0 102 : SIP/102 State:Idle Watchers 0 101 : SIP/101 State:Idle Watchers 0
Phones wont watch a buddy again until you reboot them…

  • Nihal
2

I’ve searched the wiki, Google, the Oreilly book, and the forums. I give up… What are dialplan hints and watchers?

3

rightbrain,

There is very little documentation. I only found these two pages on the wiki:

This page has a short description of what hints are:
voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+ … extensions

And this page is the general Polycom page which has a little information on setting up ‘buddies’ (same thing)
voip-info.org/wiki-Polycom+Phones

The basic jist is that using hints you can have your phone tell you if Bob, Frank, Sam, etc, are “on the phone, online, or away”.

My problem is that hint tracking stops each time I ‘reload’ my asterisk service.

4

You can find other information even here:

voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+presence

I’m actually having this problem with sip extensions;
when I call a person that is not on line * answers:
"The personal extension xxx is on the phone"
instead of:
“The personal extension xxx is unvailable”

I’ve solved the problem commenting the line
;exten => 200,hint,SIP/200
but in this way I lost the presence informations.
I’m serching a solution…
Tomorrow I’ll tell you what happens to me when reloading;
C.