RESERVE BOUNTY: Aastra XML SLA (Share "Line" Experience)

I'll put in to be a hero. I could REALLY use this.

Any new info on this Ethan?

http://www.asteriskpbx.org/node/48342

This should cut your development time down to one weekend!

SLA .pdf:
http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.4/doc/sla.pdf?view...

SLA .conf Example:
http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.4/configs/sla.conf...

Oh, and you can send the bounty my way when you get a chance.

If this is still looking good, i can put in a fairly firm commitment. This is the single biggest feature my users will miss when i port them over, and if i can have something similar, i'll be a hero twice :) If HUDLite ever works properly, will this have any affect on its parking lot, or will it continue to operate as usual?

Maury

Ah well, I tried to help. Good to know though! :-)

all right!!!! - anyone else?????

- i cant count the amount of people who have been bi@#$ing and wining about not having SLA - or is it not that important?

55i is a perfect, top end all around phone - 57i - I try to push as an executive set- 9133 and 480 are good, but built around older platform, loosing features fast. 53 is a low end, and 51 i try not to mention.

I'd like this to work on 480i if possible. We present the 55i and 57i along side the 480i phones. They keep picking 480i phone!

Ethan-
You can definitely count me in on the bounty. $300 is a small price to pay to get this feature working. Thanks

Chris Denton

what a hero!

Ethans:

What's the status on this project?

Can you also make this work with the cordless phones that comes with the 57i and other Aastra phones, that would be the deal sealer for my clients.

Dean
Anaheim, CA

I think things are cooking on this at the moment.

I am sure there will be some good stuff in this area soon.

Ethan:

My suggestion is to keep it simple. Don't go overboard with XML commands this and XML commands that. Just make it so we can have shared SIP extentions or lines. This way we can program each LINE SIP to a shared extention and use the keys that are already on the phones. This would also allow all these useless cordless phones to have SLA as well.

One thought I had is to develop sub extentions, IE an extention under an already existing extention. So if you have ext 101, then you would create 101.01, 101.02, etc. Each subextention would then be assigned a phone as a line. Now what ever happens to x101 gets passed down to each sub extention so if a call comes into x101, then x101 and all the sub extentions would ring. If a call is placed on hold, then it's showing on hold on all the substations as well. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Extentions Phones
101 Line 1 on phone x101
101.02 Line 1 on phone 102
101.03 Line 1 on phone 103
101.04 Line 1 on phone 104

102 Line 2 on phone 102
102.01 Line 2 on phone 101
102.03 Line 2 on phone 103
102.04 Line 2 on phone 104

etc..

I think you get the idea on how the extentions would be created.

So if a call comes in and rings X101, then it would ring 101, 101.02, 101.03 and 101.04 at the same time. If anyone grabs the phone, then all four extentions would show the call in progress. If the call is put on hold, then all four extentions would show it on hold, etc..

Now this idea may end up being an extention of Asterisk but if done right I think it would solve most if all of the SLA type features everyone's been asking for.

Hope this helps.

Dean
Anaheim, CA

Scott:

I have two Aastra phones here and I do think that for an Aastra solution what's there with the XML scripts are great. But like you said it's vendor specific and will only work on the Aastra phone. To me, that's tunnel vision if it only works for one phone vendor. I'm trying my hardest to come up with a solution that's NOT vendor specific so it will work with any SIP phone regardless if it's a real phone or a soft phone.

To you suggestion of contributing, I do. Did you see the WIKI article I posted on how to setup your Trixbox behind a dynamic firewall for remote phones to work (http://www.trixbox.org/wiki/how-configure-trixbox-remote-phones-c...)? I've also started to help some folks with other issues as well so althought I'm new I am trying to 'add value' to this forum by making posts and contributing where I can. Hopefully during the summer time I can take a course to better understand Linux, then I'll start diving into the realm of Asterisk itself. But for now, I am reaching out to the great folks like yourself to help me along.

Now let me ask you an interesting question. After spending the time to research things out I can see why the SLA feature in Asterisk does not work well. Therefore do you have a suggestion for another Open Source SIP phone system that I can download that has SLA working properly?

Thanks!

Dean
Anaheim, CA

Scott:

If you are referring to the bounty for the SLA that Ethan posted, then yes I've already committed money to him in helping him with that. I haven't received instructions yet on how to get that money to him, but I did leave a post in that thread stating that I would contribute money to help get that done. Am I missing something else???

I downloaded freeswitch (trixswitch.com) last night and was looking for the web interface so that would explain why I couldn't find one. I'll have to dig deep into that website (which isn't as good as Trixbox) and see how to get it going with those XML files as you stated.

Thanks!!

Dean
Anaheim, CA

I downloaded the Trixswitch ISO and created a virtural machine on my server with it. I do have the entire ISO download of CentOS so I could have done that but I figured if Trixswitch has it all done as one ISO then go for it.

Dean
Anaheim, CA

Oops, looks like this one has already been met. I'll put it toward the call screening app.

Unfortunately, I have run into a situation where I am owed about $1300 in bounties that weren't paid, so I have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth right now and am apprehensive about taking on such a large project on faith alone. It's too bad, too, because I was going to start it this week and hopefully have something done in a couple weeks.

Ethan -

Please publish the names of the loosers who stiffed you.

To anybody reading this thread this is why bad attitudes surface on the forum. What is the possible incentive to share any of this stuff if people won't honor their commitment?

Maybe a little perspective would help. Ethan is an expert programmer and his company Schmooze Communications authors applications for their users.

The reverse bounty process was brilliantly conceived. A small stipand (certainly not enough to cover the value of his work) is posted. Then the work is returned in the form of Open Source.

So I implore those who have not paid to do the right thing and Paypal those funds today.

Thanks everyone for the support. The vindictive side of me really wants to call people out when they do things like this, but I'm honestly really sick and tired of all the drama around here lately so I'll hold my tongue. It seems like I've been holding my tongue a lot lately, even when good people doing very important work for the community are getting attacked.

If I don't get the money, I don't get the money. It's just too bad that it will make me a lot more cautious in the future. I really want to trust people, but it never seems to work out.

It just really gets to me when I work so hard on things for people, fulfill my end of the bargain, and then get slighted. It's great when I can work on a project that benefits my business, benefits others in the community, and puts some extra money in my pocket all at the same time. My time is important to me, though.

Don't give up hope Ethan. There's still some creditable people on the forum. How much is needed to meet the bounty? I can give $300.00 but not until after Aug. And I always pay... LOL

Dean,

Don't worry. This bounty hasn't been collected. We're talking about other ones.

I'm going to send the $300.00 anyway (First week of Sept.). Distribute it as you see fit.. Your away status script was a big seller for my first client.

Ethan can you please let us know what your paypal email address is. We really do want to help.

We should all look out for good people getting attacked around here also. I agree with Ethan that all the drama is killing the forums karma. People really want to help and if you are helping please do so without attacking noobs or anyone asking a question. We can get this forum on the good Karma track again.

Haven't seen any post from Ethan??

I'm in for $300...all of my clients want this. I'm willing to pay up front also.

Scott

I am waiting to begin this project until one of my feature requests makes it into the Aastra firmware. Specifically, I am waiting for the Aastra phones to support SIP NOTIFY's with a state of confirmed and <param pname="+sip.rendering" pvalue="no"/> to activate a slow blink on a subscribed extension. Snom supports it. Aastra doesn't right now. SLA/Shared Extension support is useless without a differentiation between slow blink, fast blink, solid, and no light. Everything is there except for the slow blink.

I too could put in $300 if this is able to move ahead.

I haven't been following up with the folks at aastra lately, so I don't know if my firmware request is in there. I'll take a look and follow up with them if necessary.

I would actually love to get this project going since I have a lot of down time right now.

I'm in for $300 as well, but only if this is substantially complete by the end of 2009.

ethans, are you planning on making this a freepbx thing or specifically trixbox? I am no longer using trixbox but am using freepbx. i would be in for $300 if I can run this on any freepbx platform ( and of coarse aastra implements your need in firmware).

Thanks

I have a co-worker using the 6730i phones who is able to remotely make solid or blink the 8 BLF fields on this phone at different rates. He is currently doing this through a custom XML script (not sip) so he must know the IP addresses of the extensions through a mapping file. This might work for what you are talking about. I think the biggest issue is going to be how to pull a call on-hold. Other than this his script would work.

I've also tried using the sla.conf from Russell Bryant w/o success. Calls placed on hold don't work, and to date I still haven't seen anything that tells me someone has this working well in a production environment. It's also not clear how the phones need to behave or what phones are even compatible with his patch. However, his patch on the surface appears to work - the documentation is sparse and lacking. Most of us here are not trying to utilize zap trunks but sip trunks - there are hacks to make this work. Someone needs to come up with a complete dialplan of a working setup and then see which phones are capable of working with the system or not.

I've spoken w/ Russell over e-mail. He's been somewhat helpful, but I'm sure he's busy at asterisk and the sla project is low on his priority list.

To date, the BLF/XFER field on buttoms 5, 6, 7, 8 works best. We use a parking lot. These settings work incredibly well and somewhat mimic a key system in terms of call pickups.

Keys BLF/XFER on 6730i
5- 71
6- 72
7 - 73
8 - 70

button 8 parks calls, buttons 5-7 are BLF's for the parking lot. We've had success with this so far and it's easy to use.

Brock

I guess I should alter my statement on what I actually need as I think that this will be true of MOST poeple that want some sort of key system emulation.

I dont necessarily need trunk->line_button mapping. The real feature im looking for is to have the system push out that status of each line button to a group of phones(probably all phones) that line button1 should be marked as either in-use if you are on a call or if you hold a call pull that over to a parking lot and mark all those buttons as busy and set them up to dial into the parking lot when taken off-hook.

The external line numbers/trunk number dont really matter as I dont care if a caller dials in on line 2, 3 or 5, I just want everyone to have a consistant appearance of line buttons and to remove the process of parking calls. This would also be better as you could hold an internal call that comes from another phone system via SIP trunk without special consideration for which line that would come in.

Scott,

You're absolutely right for customers with more than about 25 phones - and Cisco definitely does NOT target anything lower than that.

However, many of us feel trixbox does fit smaller business needs as well. Why? Because the alternative KSU's cost so much! Nortel, for example, charges license fees for just about every modern feature on their systems. Need another voicemail box? $100 please. Want voicemail to email? That'll be $130. Do you want meet-me conferencing? SIP trunks? KSU(PBX) interconnection? Those will all cost much, much more.

If only trixbox could emulate a small-ish key system, we could blow these other vendors out of the water. But maybe Aastra's not interested - they'd probably rather sell their Aastralink Pro...

SkykingOH
Cisco Call manger can have a single extension on any number of phones. instead of SLA it would be SEA or shared extension availability. For asterisk to emulate this you would need to be able to have many devices register the same extension to a button. currently, the most recent device to register gets the calls and that extensions appearance (busy, hold, on hook) is not reflected on other phones.

This would work for many people who want to have these small systems. simply map each trunk, reguardless of source(zap/dahdi/zip/iax,t1), to an extension. The scenario would be:
2 sip trunks, 1 zap trunk. just make extensions which are the phone number so sip1=5555 sip2=5556 and zap1= 5557 ( their DIDs are 555-555(5-7)) and then on phone 1 map line button 1 to 5555 and line button 2 to 5556 etc, repeat on phone 2,3,4,5,etc. The limitation being how many line buttons you have. I do a lot of systems that just have 3 lines but I buy mostly 5 line appearance phones (57i). If they need a larger system either move back to the standard setup or break out the phones into groups and have one group have certain DID/extensions and another group have a different set.

In call manager I would also put in an extension 555 to go with 5555 so that 5555 on busy forwarded to 555 and on no answer to vm, 555 on busy and no answer go to vm. That is a fairly common scheme I think and lets a person have 2 line appearances on their line. I would let the phone company handle hunt groups.