asterisk users - Mar 2006 - Snom 360 Hinting tricks

I was always puzzled by posts to the list about people having problems
getting hints to work on a Snom, since I always seem to have no problem
making it work. That is, until today when I tried to get a sidecar to work.
All I could do was get a monitored extension light to light up continuously,
regardless of state. Frustrating! Going back to my working dialplans where I
got 1 or 2 lights working fine, I saw the pattern and the difference between
working and non-working, and I realized that other people were experiencing
the same problem as I was. The trick is the *order* in which you put your
hint priorities in your dialplan. My non-working sidecar dialplan had all
the hint priorities grouped together:

exten => 12345,hint,SIP/12345
exten => 12346,hint,SIP/12346

Which would register the hint, but it wouldn't work on the Snom. The way to
make it work, for sure, is to make sure your hint priority is the last
priority underneath the *related* priority for the extension. So, this will
work:

exten => 12345,1,Dial(SIP/12345)
exten => 12345,2,Voicemail(u12345)
exten => 12345,hint,SIP/12345

exten => 12346,1,Dial(SIP/12346)
exten => 12346,2,Voicemail(u12346)
exten => 12346,hint,SIP/12346

But this won't:

exten => 12345,hint,SIP/12345
exten => 12346,hint,SIP/12346

exten => 12345,1,Dial(SIP/12345)
exten => 12345,2,Voicemail(u12345)

exten => 12346,1,Dial(SIP/12346)
exten => 12346,2,Voicemail(u12346)

Also, you will get hooped if you lower-case your "SIP" statements. So
SIP/12345 will work but sip/12345 won't. 

As long as you follow these two tricks above, hint-ing is very
straightforward and painless. If you don't, it's really frustrating to
get
going (as I found out today after a couple of hours of swearing)

On 3/6/06, Colin Anderson <ColinA@landmarkmasterbuilder.com>
wrote:
> I was always puzzled by posts to the list about people having problems
> getting hints to work on a Snom, since I always seem to have no problem
> making it work. That is, until today when I tried to get a sidecar to work.
> All I could do was get a monitored extension light to light up
continuously,
> regardless of state. Frustrating! Going back to my working dialplans where
I
> got 1 or 2 lights working fine, I saw the pattern and the difference
between
> working and non-working, and I realized that other people were experiencing
> the same problem as I was. The trick is the *order* in which you put your
> hint priorities in your dialplan. My non-working sidecar dialplan had all
> the hint priorities grouped together:
[snip]

Another "hint" for getting hints working, although this only relates
to older 1.0.x versions of Asterisk (It is already fixed in 1.2.x) is
that status changes are not notified for channels where there is a
hyphen '-' in the channel name, so replacing all hyphens with
underscores in your sip.conf section names might prove useful :)

Cheers,
Steve