I have run into a little issue that needs clarification. A customer of ours has a problem where message lights on their SNOM 370 phones (v8.4.35 firmware) do not blink when a vm has been left. After scrounging for answers, I have found that people have used ‘@default’ instead of ‘@device’ in the mailbox field of the device configuration. I have tested this on my own SNOM 370, and it seems to work rather well. However, there is a little bit of concern about any unknowns that could be problematic.
Most of what I have found about it is covered under older forum threads where the systems had an older version of Asterisk (v1.4) and they were using something like Trixbox or Elastix. I honestly do not believe that really makes a difference, but we choose to err on the side of caution. What I am looking for here is either some expert advice, some documentation, and/or a more recent example of this solution being successfully used.
Just in case anyone needs to know, we are using the FreePBX distro, v1.87.29.55.
Okay. But why would the auto-generated default be @device if it is supposed to be @default? Is this something that has been overlooked? What is the difference between the two? For our personal server, we have not had problems with @device except earlier on with the ‘pollmailboxes’ setting which was found to be set as undefined by default. Now it seems to work just fine. But, for some reason, it does not work for our customer.
The proper setting has been @device and not @default though there have been some changes recently.
The reason it is @device is because FreePBX does a symlink between the device directory in voicemail and the actual user directory which is usually under “default” unless you have changed it. This is done since some FreePBX configurations can have users login and logout of a phone, and when this happens the symlinks are changed so that the phone’s MWI reflects the current user.
The most likely reason for MWI lights not working is a lack of a polling interval in the voicemail configuration. Older versions of Asterisk did not require this but newer versions do.
The downside of being @device is there can be a delay after leaving a message and the next polling interval triggering the MWI. As a result, in 2.10 we made a change. When the configuration files are generated, we check if the give device is a “fixed” device (which is the case in extension mode and 90%+ configurations). If that is the case it means the phone does NOT allow another user to login to it. If we detect that, we actually write out '@default" (or what ever the configured mailbox folder is for that user) although we don’t change the configuration so you will still see @device in the GUI. The benefit of this is simply a more responsive MWI light since Asterisk will result in updating the light immediately after the message is left. You still need to have the polling setup so that if the phone happens to be offline at the time, it gets updated the next interval.
So, would you recommend using @device where possible? What is the downside to using @default in a user/device configuration?
The main issue that we are dealing with is that the lights are not blinking at all. I have set pollmailboxes to yes and the pollfreq to 10 (I assume that is in seconds). They use SNOM 370’s which tend to show if they have messages on the display, but the light just does not blink. It has not been a problem on our system, though. And we use much of the same equipment.
if all your devices are ‘fixed’ devices then @default is fine, as far as why they aren’t blinking there must be some other issue or something is wrong with the symlinks.
Most of our phones are SNOM 360’s. Recently we have had to purchase some SNOM 370’s and the message light is always on. It does not change state if there is a message. On all the SNOM 360 phones the message light works. Is there something in the SNOM 370 web config that I need to change to get these to work correctly? We are using FreePBX 2.10.1.4.
Thanks