Static Agents being removed from queue?

We have an odd problem with our queue failover behaviour. We have four static agents in our queue, which has a failover destination to a ring group. Sometimes, the behaviour seems to change, in that after entering the queue, calls go straight to the failover destination without first ringing the queue’s agents. The only way we can get it back to normal is by performing a reload.

It seems that the glitch may be triggered when a call legitimately goes to the failover destination. It’s as though this initial failover call is taking the static agents out of the queue. We haven’t yet confirmed that that’s what is triggering it.

Any advice on what may be causing such behaviour would be appreciated.
Regards

Hi what does your queues.conf look like ?

Ian

As follows:

[100]
announce-frequency=30
announce-holdtime=no
autofill=no
eventmemberstatus=yes
eventwhencalled=yes
joinempty=no
leavewhenempty=yes
maxlen=3
music=default
periodic-announce-frequency=0
queue-callswaiting=queue-callswaiting
queue-thankyou=queue-thankyou
queue-thereare=queue-thereare
queue-youarenext=queue-youarenext
retry=5
strategy=ringall
timeout=30
weight=0
wrapuptime=10
member=Local/491@from-internal/n,0
member=Local/417@from-internal/n,0
member=Local/419@from-internal/n,0
member=Local/413@from-internal/n,0

There is also another setting in an included conf file as follows:

persistentmembers=yes

Regards,

I’m curious - when this happens, can you “fix” the queuing by doing a “module reload app_queue”?

We have FreePBX, so we’ve only performed reloads via that as yet, so I’m guessing that reloads everything. Next time it happens, I’ll try the app_queue reload.

I also need to run a show queue to confirm that it’s actually removing the static agents next time. Based on the fact that they return upon reload, I’m assuming that that’s what’s happening though.

Regards

The reason I asked is because I ran into a similar problem running Asterisk 1.4. I setup a cron process to run:

/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx “module reload app_queue.so”

That runs once an hour, which works for us. I’ve never been too exciting about the queueing in Asterisk and have actually written my own queueing application in extensions.conf and func_odbc - which may be a bit more involved than FreePBX allows. So far it’s working fine, but I haven’t rolled out the custom queueing to the whole office, yet. I enjoy re-inventing the wheel. :wink:

Hi

One of the issues I can see is that the members are Local channels. This means that their status will normally show as (unknown)

what happens if you set the members as actual SIP or IAX channels ?

Also are you saying that if you do a a show queues they dont even show up ?

Ian

Hi Ian,

When I do a show queues normally, they do show up. I have not yet tried it when the issue is occurring. I have to wait until it occurs again before I can try.

I’m relatively new to the world of VOIP and Asterisk, so I wouldn’t really even know where to begin to set the members up as SIP or IAX channels, but I’ll look into it.

Regards

Hi jdmetzger,

We experienced the problem again, and I can confirm that running module reload app_queue worked in getting things back on track.

Ian,

I ran the show queues command, and the queue still had all of it’s static members, so my assumption that they were being removed was incorrect. However, they were all invalid. Normally, they have a status of active or not in use, but when this problem occurred, they had a status of invalid

Hi

What version of Asterisk ?

Ian

Ok

Had a think about this more, Have you defined call limits for the members extensions ? and do they transfer the calls to other users ?

Local chanels are odd when it comes to queues, I only use them for remote agents on mobiles etc.

have a look at this bug its similar to your issue in as much as status isnt being updated.

bugs.digium.com/view.php?id=12958

Ian

We seem to have worked out what’s causing this problem… sort of.

We use Pika Fax which is supposed to allow a fax to be sent to each users direct number, which will then send the fax to the users email address. Looking at the logs, it seems that when after (or during) a fax has been processed by Pika, Asterisk stops and restarts. I happened to be running a cli trace at the same time and noticed that the queue calls were referencing some ZOMBIE state. When I ran the show queue command, the queue members had a status of invalid.

I don’t know why Pika is causing asterisk to stop and start again, and I don’t know why the queue gets set to an invalid (zombie) state as a result.

This also happens to be what is causing the audio to drop out during a call as discussed in this thread http://forums.digium.com/viewtopic.php?t=66455

Regards