[Asterisk-Users] All Page ??

[Jeremy Gault]

I have (sort of) made this work in our environment.

There was an AGI script (Google for polycom allcall.agi) written in Perl 
that would implement a hack to do this.  Basically, you can set the 
Alert-Info SIP header and cause the Polycom phones to auto-answer.  The 
general idea behind allcall.agi (and the associated dialplan that's 
documented with it) is that you dial a paging extension, allcall.agi 
creates callfiles for each extension (with Alert-Info set for 
auto-answer), puts them in /var/spool/asterusk/outgoing and causes 
Asterisk to call each extension.  When those extensions answer, it puts 
them into a MeetMe conference (in listen-only mode.)  Then the caller 
goes into the same conference in talk-only mode.  There's a hard time 
limit after which the call is terminated.

I had some issues with the Perl script, so I wrote my own version in 
PHP.  I also made some modifications to the conference flags (making the 
person paging a marked user, and having all the pagees be disconnected 
when the marked user hangs up, which takes away the time limit on pages 
and even the need for it.)  The PHP script itself worked well.

However, I ran into another issue: I had an extra call file that would 
basically dial Local/pagebeep at internal-special (I setup an 
internal-special context, with a pagebeep extension that would wait a 
second, play a beep, and hang up.)  The idea was to tell people to wait 
until after the beep (which would give the phones all time to sync up) 
before speaking.

That worked great when paging from an analog extension, but when doing 
it from a SIP extension, Asterisk complained about codecs and formats 
not matching.  I tried it with MeetMe2 and it worked, but MeetMe2 does 
not support marked users and such (which I want to have.)

I could dispose of the beep and just tell people to wait a few seconds, 
and that would work, and would probably work for you.

          Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Gault, KD4NED    <jgault at winworld.cc>
Network Administrator, WinWorld Corporation
Member: Bradley County ACS/RACES/SkyWarn
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