[Asterisk-Users] Multiple Servers and One Central Voicemail

[Anton Jackson-Smith]

Anton Krall wrote:

>Guys.
>
>I know how to make 2 asterisk servers dial each other via IAX and such but I
>was wondering if there is a way to only have 1 centrl voicemail and not have
>each asterisk have its own voicemails.
>
>Is this possible?
>  
>
Hi Anton,
I'm fairly sure this is possible - I've been looking into setting up 
something similar myself.
 From memory, you need to configure one server to dial a specific 
extension on the other via IAX which connects to voicemail.
For example:

Voicemail server:
    [inbound-iax]
    exten => _999XXXX,1,Voicemail(u${EXTEN:3})

Other server:
    [macro-remoteVM] ; Macro to connect to voicemail on remote system
    exten => s,1,Dial(IAX2/user:pass at vmserver.example.com/999${ARG1},20)
    exten => s,2,Playback(invalid)
    exten => s,3,Hangup

    [default]
    exten => 1234,1,Dial(SIP/user)
    exten => 1234,2,Macro(remoteVM, ${EXTEN})
    exten => 1234,3,Hangup

Basically, if you dial extension 1234 on the other server and noone 
answers, the remoteVM macro dials 999+the extension on the voicemail server.
The wildcard on the voicemail server recognises that you want to forward 
to voicemail (from the 999 prefix) and calls voicemail on the original 
extension (${EXTEN:3} removes the 999 from the front.
Unfortunately, the limitation of this method is that you can't 
differentiate between unavailible and busy messages, however you could 
get around this by creating a busy voicemail extension as well as an 
unavailible one (ie, prefix extention with 999 for unavailible or 998 
for busy).

I hope this helps, good luck with your setup,
Anton Jackson-Smith