asterisk users - Nov 2003 - Hold, park, transfer, etc-- How is it done?

Hello--

I've gotten a rudimentary system up & running, and I now have these
problems/questions/comments/surprises:

Problem 1:
In voicemail, using "6" to go to the next message doesn't seem to
work
at all.

Problem 2:
And, I specified a group to dial as an option in an extension. I have
only one of the 3 extensions plugged in, and it doesn't ring (but the
console says it's ringing the first member of the group.) What gives? Am
I malspecifying the group (Zap/g3) in the dial command in the
extensions.conf file? Or describing it wrongly in zapata.conf? Or, do I 
need all members of the group plugged into the card?

Big Question:
How do you put a call on hold? How would you transfer the call? What is
"call park", and how does that play into all this? What cool features
come pretty much default with asterisk? How are they accessed?

Comment on Docs:
The documentation available on the Digium site is nice, at least, for
what is there. It'd be nice to see it finished up... in the meantime,
the (ie) "show application gotoif" seems to suffice... and the mailing
list
has answered a few questions, like how to record messages for playback.

Pleasant Surprise:
I've got a 1970's rotary dial phone (which miraculously works instead of
touch tone with asterisk!), and a few cheap touch-tone phones to test
all this.

Thanks,

murf

--

On Wednesday, November 05, 2003 4:13 PM, Steve Murphy 
[SMTP:murf@e-tools.com] wrote:
>
<snip>
> Problem 2:
> And, I specified a group to dial as an option in an extension. I have
> only one of the 3 extensions plugged in, and it doesn't ring (but the
> console says it's ringing the first member of the group.) What gives?
> Am
> I malspecifying the group (Zap/g3) in the dial command in the
> extensions.conf file? Or describing it wrongly in zapata.conf? Or, do
> I
> need all members of the group plugged into the card?
In the case of using a group, the dial command will find one of the 
group that is not busy and dial it. If you want to ring multiple phones 
(extensions) simultaneously, then you need to specify that as part of 
the dial command.
exten => 353,1,Dial(SIP/192.168.50.188&Zap/10,18)

<snip>
>
> murf
>
> --

On Wed, 5 Nov 2003 17:46:16 -0600, Don Pobanz wrote
> If you want to ring multiple 
> phones 
> (extensions) simultaneously, then you need to specify that as part 
> of the dial command. exten =>
353,1,Dial(SIP/192.168.50.188&Zap/10,18)
Actually, I have had problems trying to do this, at least if
Zap/10 is a FXO. What happens is, both are dialed, but then
the FXO gets marked as "ANSWERED" before the remote end has
picked up (I read somewhere that this has to do with preventing
reuse of the channel...), and the SIP phone stops ringing.