[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk, festival, dropped calls

[Quentin Cope]

Hi

I have been playing around with asterisk for a few days now. I have asterisk
running with a single x100p card and a couple of x-lite "extensions". Here's
where I am at:

I can make calls between the extensions. Voice mail seems to work OK. I can
use the x100p card to dial out to the PSTN over the analogue interface and
receive calls fine. I have my FWD account hooked up as well and that seems
to work ok.

Yesterday I got festival connected up but I am seeing some bizarre
behaviour. If in extensions.conf I have something like :

exten => s,1,Answer
exten => s,2,Festival('Hello')
exten => s,3,Wait(4)
exten => s,4,Hangup


Then a call coming in over the PSTN is fine. I hear Stephen Hawking over the
phone and nothing looks too bad on the console. However if I set up
extensions.conf so that festival is invoked from one of my x-lite extensions
then it all starts to get weird. It seems to work fine as long as I don't
have my headset plugged into the PC where I have x-lite running! If I do
then the call seems to be dropped immediately without me hearing festival.
Similarly if I invoke festival as a result of a call from FWD it is also
dropped.

Where's best to start looking? I sort of thought I was getting to grips with
SIP and asterisk (at least as a newbie ;-) ). Does the problem with the call
being dropped indicate that I haven't really got x-lite / fwd running
correctly with asterisk? It just seems so improbable that plugging in a
headset on a PC could cause problems with software running on asterisk. Or
is festival just a bit flaky and not to be trusted?


Quentin