My Asterisk 1.4 server died, and I am currently trying to get Asterisk 11 operational.
I have my phones defined in users.conf with “hassip = yes” defined. My understanding is that this is the shorthand way to telling Asterisk this is a sip phone, and to register it, without having to configure each phone in sip.conf.
Am I missing something? Did these things change from 1.4 to 11?
Do I need to setup each phone is sip.cong?
Thanks much for your assistance,
Fred
While users.conf still “works”, you should know that the project has deliberately and purposefully moved away from users.conf. In fact, the new PJSIP stack in Asterisk 13 has no support for it, nor - I imagine - would we ever want to add support for it. (Being an open source project I could be wrong, but it would be extremely difficult to shoehorn that functionality in there in an effective manner.)
There’s a lot of reasons for that:
The users.conf functionality was never really implemented in a way that made it easy to parse configuration both from it and the canonical configuration files. This led to lots of “weird” behavior where functionality from users.conf didn’t behave the same as if the configuration was read from sip.conf or voicemail.conf.
It made reloads far more difficult to process, as multiple configuration files had to be parsed and potentially merged during a reload.
Asterisk doesn’t have a core concept of a “user”, and users.conf was a half-hearted attempt to add that in. Since a system will often build a concept of a user on top of Asterisk, and that concept is determined by business logic that Asterisk has no business encapsulating, users.conf is often ill-suited or equipped to serve its intended purpose.
So: you should probably stop using users.conf some day.
All of that being said, we didn’t remove it from Asterisk 11, and it should still function. (Heck, it’s still in Asterisk 14.) Your hassip setting should be defined in the [general] context of users.conf:
genhassip = ast_true(ast_variable_retrieve(ucfg, "general", "hassip"));
If it’s not there, then we won’t pick it up. If it is, we should. Pasting the necessary bits of your users.conf would help.
Functionality of users.conf aside, there are a lot of differences between 1.4 and 11. You should definitely take the time to read through the UPGRADE and CHANGES files, as well as to review all of the things that have been changed or updated on the wiki:
Dear MJordan:
Thanks so much for your reply.
I don’t mind getting away from users.conf, but I can see I have some learning to do. I appreciate the links you provided to New in 1.8, 10, and 11. I will read those in order to figure out what changes I need to make.
Asterisk is so stable, that I have to relearn how to configure it every couple of years or so. When a change is required I need to find my notes from two years ago, and figure out what to do next.
I’m guessing, when I get into the documentation, that I will find that all my phones should be configured in sip.conf. OK, I will bite the bullet and make those changes, once I figure out what changes are required. Each extension in users.conf has about 15 entries, so I need to make sure they all will be valid in sip.conf.
It also seems appropriate for me to move to 13 at this time, once I get 11 working.
Thanks again for your quick and complete reply.
Am I a Kind Of Asterisk Nubie? Well not really, but I get into the detail so seldom I might as well be.
GBear
I’m going to suggest if you have the chance to move to 13 to do that now instead of making a half step to 11 and then upgrading later to 13.