[Asterisk-Users] New Asterisk bounty: SIP simultaneous

[Soren Rathje]

Olle E. Johansson wrote:
>> You have not shown us ANY example yet for which this
>> facility is *NEEDED*.
>> 
> Well, I have users that get an account on my PBX.
> 
> I really don't care how many phones they want to use, hardware phones
> on 
> their desktop or soft phones on their laptop while travelling. It's
> still a user with one account. When the PBX dials them, all their
> phones should ring. 
> 
> Asterisk doesn't really bother with *users*, it has a device-centric
> view 
> of life, universe and propably everything. With Asterisk, the user
> has to 
> call me each time he wants a new device connected and I have to
> reconfigure 
> his setup.
> 
> If I had support for multiple registrations on one [peer] account, the
> [peer] would become a user account instead of a device. And the user
> could add as many devices as he wanted (up to a defined limit) without
> bothering the administrator. I guess that's why a lot of people ask
> for 
> this function.
> 
> However, since Asterisk doesn't really bother with a user concept,
> we really have to teach Asterisk about users. And user groups.
> Life is much more than hardware, little Asterisk :-)
> 
> I've been discussing this many times, and so has many other people.
> I think we need an elegant way of defining users to asterisk so we
> connect peers, users, agents and mailboxes to a *user* with one
> set of credentials. If you look into your Asterisk configuration,
> you will find that there are users and credentials for logging in
> everywhere. It's not easy to maintain at all.
> 
> After a lot of discussions on the IRC, I'm convinced that we at
> some point in time have to add ast_auth - a common infrastructure
> for handling users and authentication.
> 
> This is a good topic for the Asterisk Developer's Day at Astricon.
> Let's bring it up on the agenda - A new user and authentication
> structure for Asterisk.
> 
> YALMIATASQ - Yet Another Long Mail in answer to a short question.
> 
> Hint: I have a new idea for a solution on multiple reg's.
> Raise the bounty and I might give it a try. ;-)
> 

After reading all the replies to this thread I feel we have moved far away from the original intent of the subject.

I went back and re-read the message on the bounty and that gave me the following interpretation:

[I have some users with a 7960 who are administrative assistants who monitor calls for 3 or 4 other people. It'd be nice to have two line instances for them, and one for the person(s) whom they assist.]

I think most people overlook the word "monitor", in my interpretation it gives a person the ability to view activity on other "phone lines" without being the actual recipient of the call. Actually, in a "hard" PBX solution it will also show outgoing call activity.

The problem is two fold, one is how to implement this in Asterisk, second is how to handle this event in the phone.

Most PBX equipment will allow you to do this on a digital handset with indicators on each line button so your phone will only ring when your personal line is called, and give a beep when one of the other lines receives a call. Currently I cannot see how to distinguish calls coming in unless your phone supports this feature.

One quick way to solve the problem could be to add functionality to set up "attendants/monitors/managers" in e.g. SIP.CONF (assistant => xxx) per client and then add "call for: xxxx" to the callerid message on the attendants phone. I'm sure there are other problems to be solved but at least this way it will follow the structure of a PBX.

-- Soren