Unavailable message on Inbound DID

[jfergus]

This problem has been perplexing me for a long time now, and it's especially bad now that we have gone live with our Asterisk box.

A bit of background. On the old PBX, there was a message tagging system. So basically you could just set a tag to someone's phone to ask for a call back, this would work internally only but they used it all the time.

On the current PBX in a Flash set up, I tried to recreate something similar using custom DND codes that would create a temp.wav file in the person's voice mail so that when they would hit *78 and then someone called them, it would say "do not disturb at $time". This was working fine in asterisk 1.4.23.1. Unfortunately that version crashed a lot on us. So I ran the update-source scripts and upgraded to 1.4.24.1. That fixed the crashing, but broke all of my DND codes so that instead of playing the 'unavailable' message it would play the temp.wav message even if calling the *XXXX for a direct call to their voicemail. Somewhere they changed it so the temp.wav overrides EVERYTHING on voicemail.

So I had to change my DND codes to change the busy.wav file and then it removes it when turning DND off. This little work around works for the most part, because busy.WAV is still there in case they are not on DND but are on the phone, it will play that.

The true problem, and the reason for this post, is that I would like any DID to be answered with the person's unavailable message. The one that is playing now is the DND message when the person has their phone set to DND. For example, our "Gone Home" message is *7819. When you dial this, it places a "Gone home at (time)" message that is generated by cepstral into the /var/spool/asterisk/voicemail/default/XXXX/busy.wav. Then a person calls their direct number and instead of playing their "Hi, this is Bob, I'm currently spending all my time away from work, leave a message and maybe I'll get back to you one day.", it plays the Gone Home message.

Is there a way to get all Inbound DID numbers to play the Unavailable message if the DIALSTATUS reports as BUSY?

If it weren't for the cursed Grandstream phones that we have, I wouldn't have this problem. Any and all help / suggestions would be fantastic. I apologize for the long post.

Jason

 

[ronw]

You could change dialparties.agi so it reports DIALSTATUS of NOANSWER when DND is active. Of course, this would break when FreePBX is updated.

/var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/dialparties.agi
and
/var/www/html/admin/modules/core/agi-bin/dialparties.agi

change line 321 from
$AGI->set_variable('DIALSTATUS','BUSY');
to
$AGI->set_variable('DIALSTATUS','NOANSWER');

It would be nice if FreePBX was setup with option variables so there would be flexibility for this type of change.

 

[jfergus]

Gave that a try and all I got was dead air.

They really should allow for this. A DID should basically forward to the unavailable message when no one answers, and should ignore DND all together. At least I would think so.

Thanks for the suggestion!

 

[ronw]

Gave that a try and all I got was dead air.

They really should allow for this. A DID should basically forward to the unavailable message when no one answers, and should ignore DND all together. At least I would think so.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Did you restart Asterisk?

amportal restart

The change works on my test box.