[Asterisk-Dev] Distinctive ringing

[Steven Critchfield]

On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 14:20, John Todd wrote:
> >On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 11:15, Jayson Vantuyl wrote:
> >>  On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 12:03:49PM -0700, John Todd wrote:
> >>  > There is a pending patch that Mark has been given (by "km-", whose
> >>  > real name I don't recall) that will add this "distinctive ring"
> >>  > feature to Asterisk, by setting a variable before sending a call to a
> >>  > SIP outbound channel via Dial.
> >>  Is there a similar way to signal a distinictive ring with Zaptel?
> >
> >I've off and on thought about this, and the comments about how no known
> >phone right now is RFC compliant. The comments have said that there are
> >a couple of different ways of signaling the different rings.
> >
> >This brings me to the idea that could potentially bring the dial command
> >back to something usable just like the zapata way. Could you not make
> >ring definitions on a per sip user basis and reference them with a
> >number just like the way we do with zapata? Maybe in a homogeneous SIP
> >device environment you could define the distinctive rings in the general
> >section, but in a heterogeneous environment the ability to set the rings
> >local to the user/phone would eliminate the problem of the RFC says to
> >provide a URL, but cisco says an integer is enough.
> >
> >I'll admit I don't have enough knowledge of how SIP works to do any more
> >than suggest this to those who may make the changes.
> >--
> >Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>
> 
> [prior responses to this have already addressed the basic question of 
> how to get Zaptel devices to use distinctive ringing]
> 
> Steve -
>    Using a numeric is still not compliant to the spirit of the 
> Alert-Info: header information.  The problem is that SIP phones may 
> not be sitting on your LAN, using your ringers, or even owned by you, 
> and it's more likely that remote SIP phones aren't even "known" by 
> Asterisk until the moment they are dialed - this rules out a prior 
> mapping of a numeric to a particular ringtype.  Including a 
> fully-qualified URL in the Alert-Info: header is the only way to 
> ensure that the soundfile that you specify will be possibly be 
> accessed by the remote phone.

Don't expect many vendors to implement a url to a wav file as a ring
tone without some form of distinct limitations available. I can just see
the new form of spamming porn by doing a port scan for SIP phones then
making the ring tone some advertisement for a 1900 number or website.
Hell for that matter unless you are doing some other form of call
filtering, your telemarketers would just move the spiel to the ring
tone.
I would only expect a ring tone url to accepted from a proxy your trust
and had some say in configuration. Also I doubt the idea was for a
caller to determine the ring tone. 

>    Of course, there is no "MUST" in the usage for Alert-Info: so it 
> starts to become dependent on each vendor as to how they implement 
> distinctive ringing.  Using a numeric might suffice and be compatible 
> with the Zap channel syntax, but I would suspect that this will not 
> be a viable solution when vendors start to implement the ringtypes.
> 
> Side note: Remember when all cellphones had one ringer?  As the 
> technology of cellphone call delivery became "commonplace", the focus 
> of vendors moved away from basic functionality into the shiny, stupid 
> features like playing "1812 Overture" with the ring alert.  SIP isn't 
> to the point where the basic functionality is completely nailed down, 
> but within the next year expect to see the "bells and whistles" 
> features start to become more developed as vendors shift their dev 
> teams away from core functionality (which will be completed.) 
> Putting the feature hooks in correctly _now_ will save a lot of 
> headache if we can guide the vendors into building features to match 
> the hooks in a scaleable way.

This is why I say to define them in your sip.conf file with a reference
number, then reference them in the dial string.

kind of like this
-------sip.conf-----
[ciscouser]
ringtone1 => 1
ringtone2 => 2
ringtone3 => 3
defaultringtone => 1

[rfccompliant]
ringtone1 => http://www.ringtones-r-us.com/train.wav
ringtone2 => http://www.ringtones-r-us.com/race-engine.wav
ringtone3 => http://www.pornsite.com/cum-meet-me.wav
defaultringtone => 1


------extension.conf---------
exten => 1,1,dial(Sip/ciscouser)
exten => 2,1,dial(Sip/ciscouser|r2)
exten => 3,1,dial(Sip/rfccompliant|r3)

-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>