asterisk users - May 2004 - Holding and call parking idiosyncrasies...

We are going to replace a BizFone with Asterisk and one of the features 
that I haven't been able to emulate is the PBX hold.  We can put a call 
into hold with the * key and every 30 sec the phone gets a beep to 
remind us it is there and the caller on hold can hit # for other 
options.

The closest I've come with Asterisk is call parking, and that doesn't 
quite do it.  Using the standard include => parkedcalls (with digium 
FXS cards) I get different behavior depending on whether the calling or 
called extension does the parking.

If the called extension parks the call, it will be parked and when the 
timeout expires the original extension will be run (for pickup or 
voicemail).

If the calling extension parks the call, the call will go to the 
parking spot just fine but when the timer expires we get:

Channel Zap/2-1 sent into invalid extension 's' in context
'default',
but no invalid handler

There is nothing in the parking docs that discusses needing a default 
context for the call to return to.  I can create a context with that 
name, but I'm not sure what it should do...  I don't know if there's
a
way to extract the original extension and have it called in the default 
context.

Is there more information on this somewhere?

-Michael

My turn to say "Doh!"  But I think I've figured out the way the
parking
works.

It seems that when the the called station (an internal extension in my 
case) does the parking, that station will ring again when the timer 
expires.

However, it seems that when the callING station does the park and the 
timer expires, the parked call will go to s,1 of its default context 
(in my case, using just digium cards, that default context is the one 
defined for the interface in zapata.conf).

I think that I, at one point, also misunderstood the error message and 
created a context called [default] (which I did not previously have) 
and that seemed to be a fallover context.  But that was a quick test 
before I went to another task for a while.

About 2 hours later I came back to it and figured out what I have in 
the "However" paragraph above.

It would be nice if, in addition to "context => parkedcalls" (where
the
calls are parked), one could define a context where the calls would go 
when the timer expires.  And maybe if a variable would be available to 
that resulting context which indicates which extension/interface parked 
the call.

Or, maybe I'm way off base on how parking functions here and I'm 
missing some functionality...

On May 27, 2004, at 4:01 PM, Michael George wrote:
> We are going to replace a BizFone with Asterisk and one of the 
> features that I haven't been able to emulate is the PBX hold.  We can 
> put a call into hold with the * key and every 30 sec the phone gets a 
> beep to remind us it is there and the caller on hold can hit # for 
> other options.
>
> The closest I've come with Asterisk is call parking, and that
doesn't
> quite do it.  Using the standard include => parkedcalls (with digium 
> FXS cards) I get different behavior depending on whether the calling 
> or called extension does the parking.
>
> If the called extension parks the call, it will be parked and when the 
> timeout expires the original extension will be run (for pickup or 
> voicemail).
>
> If the calling extension parks the call, the call will go to the 
> parking spot just fine but when the timer expires we get:
>
> Channel Zap/2-1 sent into invalid extension 's' in context
'default',
> but no invalid handler
>
> There is nothing in the parking docs that discusses needing a default 
> context for the call to return to.  I can create a context with that 
> name, but I'm not sure what it should do...  I don't know if
there's a
> way to extract the original extension and have it called in the 
> default context.
>
> Is there more information on this somewhere?
>
> -Michael
>
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-Michael