[asterisk-users] Unicall stack, right versions?

[Steve Underwood]

Barzilai Spinak wrote:

> Thank you Steve.
> About the configs in Asterisk... I confess that I'm new to the code so 
> I still need to read more. I didn't know about ast_config()
>
> About the hardcodedness of the countries... that seems to be the 
> "problem". Everything is too oriented to "my country works like this 
> with this telephone company".
> When in fact, what I'm using is not even to connect it to a the 
> telephone company of my country but to some other machine which has an 
> old Call Center implementation with some other modification of the MF 
> R2 sequence.
> It doesn't relate specifically to any country. Yes, they are all 
> similar, and being able to specify the number of ANI and DNIS/DID is 
> sometimes all you need, that's why I could make it work.

Well that's just a weird system. Config files tend not to get over 
those. See Mexico support in Unicall for an example. :-)

>
> There's some truth in your statement that opening the configuration to 
> external files may get some people into trouble.
> On the other hand, what I see is a strange mix of:
> a) If you're doing telephony stuff you should know what you're doing
> b) Most people using Unicall (Asterisk for that matter) have very 
> little idea of what they are doing and why (copying and pasting 
> configs from here and there).
>
> So, where's the sweet spot? :-)

Most users are in category b. Usable by people who don't know what they 
are doing is paramount. As I said, config files don't get over most 
problems beyond what you can configure right now.

>
> I can spend 1 hour reading the source code and finally knowing how to 
> change it to my needs. (For example, adding a new "country")
> Should I need to? Can people from the (b) set do it?
> Is it scalable?  What is more of a support nightmare?
>
> Please take all this as constructive comments. I really appreciate 
> your work and if I had to do it from the start it would take me months 
> longer!!!
>
>
> A real question that should go in a different mail, but what the check:
>
> Let's say I have two E1 spans, but one needs to talk 
> CountryFooVersion, and the other needs CountryBarVersion (yes, both on 
> the same machine and in the same "country", maybe different number of 
> digits for ANI).

Each channel is individually configured. You could have 30 different 
configurations on a single E1.

> How would I go about configing that? 

In a unicall.conf file for chan_unicall? Set a configuration. Define 
some channels. Set a new configuration. Define some more channels. The 
most recent configuration is used as each channel is defined.

Regards,
Steve