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[Tony at plack.net]

I am working on a project that requires shared extension. Where shared line looks at the status of a line/trunk, shared extension would look at a series of channels as the same "extension".

The users would like to add destination channels on the fly, to provide roaming extensions, but maintaining fixed channels as well.

If a call comes in on an extension, the system needs to honor the fact that channel 1 is busy, therefore, the extension is busy. Keep in mind that the channel could be anything including SIP outbound trunk channels (read cell phone or hotel room).

The Dial command does provide a nice multi-channel dialer, especially with the "r" option, however, if one of the lines is busy, the system will keep ringing the other lines until timeout or answer (read voice mail).

So I am contemplating adding a feature to the dial command, that would make any channel busy, cause the initial Dial to come back as busy. Kind of a force the state flag.

Before I brake into code, does anyone have any other ideas?

This would also help with phones like Grandstream, where you have 4 accounts to configure, and would like to have all 4 SIP accounts act as 1 extension.

Tony Plack

[rj2807 at gmail.com]

I don't quite understand the use case, but it sounds like you may be
trying to do shared line appearances (http://asterisk.org/node/48342).
You seem to be alluding that you want multiple extensions to share the
state of a single extension. If that is the case, then SLA isn't quite
that. Also, Asterisk SLA doesn't support a notion of call appearance
where a single extension can receive multiple calls.

--
Raj
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 11:00 AM, Tony Plack <Tony at plack.net> wrote:

[Tony at plack.net]

Raj,
I would say you understand exactly. It is kind of a SLA, but not.

SLA does great with a inbound trunk line and multiple extensions, but even in SLA, if one extension is busy, the others ring.

There is no way to tell asterisk that if it gets a busy on one of the channels, that the extension is busy, period.

The terminology to say that multiple extensions appear as a single extension is not correct either. To say that you would have to define an extension in the system and that each of these extension numbers is pooled in a Local type dial command to the single extension. So because that terminology is not adequate, I am using one extension to multiple channels.

I am trying to create a single extension to multiple channels (lines) {exten => 5000,1,Dial(SIP\1234&SIP\phone&Local\12225551212)} but respecting busy on any channel is busy on the extension. Almost the reverse of SLA, but with all the behavior of a single extension to a single channel {exten => 5000,1,Dial(SIP\1234)}

Thanks for working with me to clarify.

Tony Plack

[rj2807 at gmail.com]

Tony,

This sounds reasonable. Today when Dial "forks" a call, the first
extension that answers "wins". It seems that you want to extend this
mechanism to say that when Dial "forks" a call, the first extension
that reports busy "wins". Sounds like a nice enhancement to Dial.

Raj
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 7:57 PM, Tony Plack <Tony at plack.net> wrote: