[Asterisk-Users] Extension 'hint' info please?

[Olle E. Johansson]

Ed Greenberg wrote:
> 
> 
> --On Saturday, June 04, 2005 10:41 PM -0700 Chris Coulthurst
> <asterisk at shuksan.com> wrote:
> 
>> I have a Polycom 500 and would love one of the line-appearance keys to
>> show me if a certain person/people are on the phone upstairs.  This
>> 'hint' priority seems to have little-to-no documentation.  So, if anyone
>> out there has a clue about this, here are a couple of questions:
>>
>> Can you 'hint' Zap and IAX2 extensions?
>>
>> Can you concatenate extensions together?
>> (i.e. exten => 200,hint,SIP/101&SIP/202&Zap/4)
>>
>> And the big one is.....
>>
>>
>> ...how does this work on a Polycom 500?
>>
> 
> And how does it work on a Cisco 7960?

I haven't seen any line status support (subscribe) in a 7960 - is this
new firmware?
Thanks to friends in the community I will soon be able to test a Polycom
and document it.

For hints I wrote a mail last week that described this in a bit more
detail. This is what I wrote:

------------------------------ OLD MESSAGE --------------------------
For those of you that haven't explored the subscription support in the
Asterisk SIP channel:

The key to get device state notification in SIP subscriptions and the
AMI, the Asterisk manager interface, is the use of a "hint"
priority. The phone subscribe to an extension, but in order for the
PBX to know which phone that is connected to an extension, you need to
tell Asterisk about the relationship you have between an extension and a
device.

exten => 3000,hint,SIP/olle
exten => 3000,dial(SIP/olle,30)

This extension in your dialplan tells Asterisk that if anyone subscribes
to extension 3000, they want to know the status of SIP/olle. Without the
hint, the extension will always be available and there's no notification
at all.

In CVS head, you can do this with IAX2 as well. I have a patch that has
been in the bugtracker for a few months that adds a bit more. If you
apply a call limit with the incominglimit, you will see that the notify
function will tell you not only if the device is available or not, but
also if they're on a call. This works beautifully with Xten's Eyebeam.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

In order to answer your other question, I changed the "show
channeltypes" command in CVS head to show channels that support device
state notification:

jarl*CLI> show channeltypes
Type        Description                                        Devicestate
----------  -----------
Feature     Feature Proxy Channel Driver                       no
Local       Local Proxy Channel Driver                         no
IAX2        Inter Asterisk eXchange Driver (Ver 2)             yes
Agent       Call Agent Proxy Channel                           yes
SIP         Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)                  yes
Modem       Generic Voice Modem Channel Driver                 no

I recently added the device state to IAX2 in cvs head, so that part does
not exist in stable. I am not running H.323 or MGCP, but there is no
support in the source code for devicestate in those channels.

Cheers,
/Olle

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