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It’s pretty hard to make Dundi and Asterisk realtime work, but I was able to make it work, thanks to the other tutorials found over the internet.

I will just try to tell you how I did it.

Let’s just start with 2 asterisk servers for now, and then you can just add more servers when you have mastered how to setup dundi.

First you need to make sure dundi is working on both asterisk servers, so setup DUNDi as describe from

Once, you have DUNDi setup properly, edit your sip.conf and insert this line on the general context

regcontext=sipregistration

Once your sip phones registers to this asterisk servers it will be included into a dynamic context named ’sipregistration’, you can verify this by typing ’show dialplan’ on the asterisk CLI.

On your dundi mappings context you need to have something like this for both servers

[mappings]
priv => sipregistration,0,SIP,(IPADDRESSOFTHEOTHERSERVER)/${NUMBER},nopartial

This will tell asterisk how to dial the other server

On your extensions.conf file you would also need to create a Macro to dial and find the extension

[dundi-priv-lookup]
include => lookupdundi

[macro-dundi-priv]
exten => s,1,Goto(${ARG1},1)
include => dundi-priv-lookup

And also, you need to catch if the phone is unavailable to trigger the Macro so you also need to put something like this on your extensions.conf

exten => XXXXXX-CHANUNAVAIL ,1,Macro(dundi-priv|${EXTEN})

That’s about it, so when CHANUNAVAIL is triggered from the other server, it will then do a dundi query on the other server and if the Extension is registered from there, meaning if the extension is seen on sipregistration, then it will pass the call to the other server.

Now you can register phones on either server and they will not miss any call with this configuration.

Ok, I received an email from a local asterisk user group asking about this and I will try and answer it here and give you samples on how to retrieve voicemail from odbc storage with mysql, asterisk and php. This is a good practice if you have a number of clustered asterisk servers and users can login on any of the servers, or maybe you are under SER or a proxy server. And also, this is convenient since voicemail can be accessed thru the phone or the web.

But sorry, I will not go into the details of the PHP code, it should be really easy already.

Ok first of all is that you have to setup voicemail odbc storate first, I will not be able to discuss it here yet.

Moving on…

From your voicemessages table, the most important column there is the longblob named “recording” it might be different on your table but it should be the longblob column.

Now create a php script that queries the “voicemessages” table

Once you have this you can change the longblob to a listenable WAV file by having this code

header(”Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=vmmessage1.wav”);
header(”Content-Description: PHP Generated Data”);
echo $row[’recording’];

Where $row[’recording’] is the longblob column.

That’s about it, you’d be able to listen or download the file and listen to it on your PC

Since we still have to wait for Asterisk 1.6 to be on production release, this is how I setup music on hold for asterisk realtime

First off is to create a table (if you haven’t yet) called ast_config

#
# Table structure for table `ast_config`
#


CREATE TABLE `ast_config` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`cat_metric` int(11) NOT NULL default ‘0′,
`var_metric` int(11) NOT NULL default ‘0′,
`commented` int(11) NOT NULL default ‘0′,
`filename` varchar(128) NOT NULL default ”,
`category` varchar(128) NOT NULL default ‘default’,
`var_name` varchar(128) NOT NULL default ”,
`var_val` varchar(128) NOT NULL default ”,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `filename_comment` (`filename`,`commented`)
) TYPE=MyISAM;
Then you have to edit extconfig.conf file to have something like this:

musiconhold.conf => mysql,multiPBX,ast_config

Using your favorite mysql administration tool ( I use phpMyAdmin) insert data with the following format

catmetric = 0
var_metric=0
commented=0
filename=musiconhold.conf
category=default
var_name=mode
var_val=files

and another one

catmetric = 0
var_metric=0
commented=0
filename=musiconhold.conf
category=default
var_name=directory
var_val=/var/lib/asterisk/sounds

***Just figure out how to do it on SQL statement, I will not have to do it for you guys.

Upload some mp3/wav/gsm files to the directory you specified.

After that, reload asterisk and you should be able to hear the sound files when you have MOH enabled.

One variation you can also do is enable streaming mp3 files by using mpg123 application by putting

var_name=application
var_val=/usr/local/bin/mpg123 -q -r 8000 -f 8192 -s –mono http://213.186.41.160:8000/

Modify everything as you want

Been a month that asterisk 1.4.18 has been released and I have yet to come and do a review about it. Hopefully it will have the necessary support for asterisk realtime and dundi that I’ve been looking for.

Anyway, stay tuned for a detailed review of this new version.

If you are looking for highly scalable way of configuring your asterisk setup, you can try Asterisk Realtime. Although it is not highly implemented yet by most asterisk users, I believe that in time things will really settle with real time configuration. For this article I am using PHP 5, MySQL 5, Asterisk 1.4, And a Debian server.

First you will need:

• Asterisk 1.4 or later versions
• Asterisk-addons
• MySQL server (you can also use psotgresql but in my case I preferred MySQL)
• (Optional) A knowledge in scripting, either PERL, PHP or whatever you are comfortable with.

Ok, after installing asterisk 1.4 and asterisk-addons successfully you will need to edit extconfig.conf

Extconfig sample:

Realtime maps have this following format:
<family name> => <driver>,<database name>[,table_name]

Where family name is any name you would like to reference the table_name
driver is what type of database you are using either odbc, mysql or ldap
database name = specify the database name
table_name = indicate the table name here

sippeers => mysql,asterisk,sip_peers
sipusers => mysql,asterisk,sip_users
queues => mysql,asterisk,queue_table
queue_members => mysql,asterisk,queue_member_table
meetme => mysql,asterisk,meetme_table
voicemail => mysql,asterisk
Also edit modules.conf to load the mysql modules

[modules]
autoload=yes
preload => res_config_mysql.so
preload => app_addon_sql_mysql.so

and edit res_mysql.conf also which has the information for connecting asterisk to mysql

When you go to your asterisk cli you should see the following

== Binding extensions to mysql/asterisk/extensions_table
== Binding sipusers to mysql/asterisk/sip_peers
== Binding sippeers to mysql/asterisk/sip_peers
== Binding voicemail to mysql/asterisk/voicemail_users
Plus type `realtime mysql status` and see if asterisk get’s connected to mysql

You can start from this, if there would be any problems it should be minimal and you can work through it

For those who are looking for a local asterisk user group, Look no more because APUG (Asterisk Philippines User Group) is now an official user group recognized by the asterisk community.

Link to the official APUG website  is here

Congratulations to the organizers and members!

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