[Asterisk-Users] call wating and call transfer

[Warren Burstein]

Recently I put callwaiting=yes in zapata.conf because customers want to 
speak to the operator in person, not leave her a voicemail, when she's 
busy with another caller.  But now she can't transfer either of the 
calls (which she can do when there's only a single call).

The operator has an analog phone connected to a TDM400B FXS line.  The 
calls are coming from PSTN lines connected to FXO lines on the TDM400B.

I searched the wiki and the list archives, found a message from this 
January, 
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2005-January/082367.html, 
about the same issue, saying

>you can try using # as a way of transfering the call, but that's a blind
>transfer meaning that you will be prompted an extension number and the call
>will be transfered and that's it
>
It wasn't clear to me what sort of channel they were talking about, but 
that would be fine, our dialplan will let the caller get back to the 
operator if the transferred extension is busy or doesn't answer.  I 
haven't used this feature before (I told the users to transfer calls by 
flashing the switchhook) I tried on my test system in my office (the 
production system is in another country) to dial one Zap FXS from 
another and hit # and nothing happened.  Does the # transfer only work 
when there is more than one call arriving on a channel?  Or does 
something need to be done to enable this?  I searched the wiki and list 
for "enable unattended transfer" and "enable blind transfer" but didn't 
find the answer.  I did find in 
http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk%20tips%20zap%20transfer, 
"How to transfer a call on a phone connected to a ZAP channel", a 
remark, "You can try # as well instead of flash" but nothing about how 
to enable # transfers.

Is there a difference between 1.0.9 (the production system) and 
1.2.0-beta1 (the test system)?  Yes, I know I shouldn't be testing on a 
different version ...

Here's the zapata.conf on my test system.  I didn't enable callwaiting 
there - does that affect # transfers?

[channels]
language = en
musiconhold = default

signalling = fxo_ks
context = internal
threewaycalling = yes
transfer = yes
group = 1
pickupgroup = 1
callerid = 101
echocancel = yes
channel => 1

callerid = 102
channel => 2

signalling = fxs_ks
context = pstn
group = 2
busydetect = yes
channel => 3-4