Dial extensions with bad prefix

[sarting]

Hi,
This is probably a stupid solution or maybe won’t have a solution at all, but my previous employee had created a ring group starting with 787, and then created extensions 78701, 78702, etc to be part of that ring group… I’d like to clean this up by dialing a few extension directly to see if they are active. Since they’re labeled generically I don’t know how to identify them. So i’m wondering if there’s a way for me to ‘bypass’ the ring group by calling the extensions directly?
Since the prefix is 787, it goes to the ring group every time. Can I force dial an extension by pressing any key combos that bypasses the ring group?

TIA!

[dicko]

Try pressing 78701 and THEN pick up the handset.

[sarting]

Thank you, but doesn’t work… goes directly to ring group.

[david55]

I don’t really understand this, as I would expect FreePBX to use an exact match for the ring group number, not “_787.”, so if you dial the complete number, it wouldn’t match and you would either get through or number not recognised.

Is there any possibility that the previous employee actually set the ring group number to “_787.” or “_787!”. That possibility isn’t documented in the user guide, but would work unless there is specific validation to prevent it.

Unfortunately the user guide suggests you cannot change the number, so you might have to delete the whole group and recreate.

However, as FreePBX generally requires the extension number to match the address of record of the device, cannot you not just check whether the extensions are registered?

[sarting]

@david55

I would expect FreePBX to use an exact match for the ring group number, not “_787.”, so if you dial the complete number, it wouldn’t match and you would either get through or number not recognised.

Is there any possibility that the previous employee actually set the ring group number to “_787.” or “_787!”. That possibility isn’t documented in the user guide, but would work unless there is specific validation to prevent it.

Is there a different spot where this would show this label? As far as i can tell, it’s just simply labeled 787. I don’t see a ! or _ anywhere in the ring group dialog window.

@david55

However, as FreePBX generally requires the extension number to match the address of record of the device, cannot you not just check whether the extensions are registered?

Even if they are registered, i need to know who they belong to… hmm… this is a good idea tho as i might be able to pinpoint location if i can get the ip of the phone it’s registered to. thank you.

[dicko]

dialing ‘direct to voicemail’ (*78701) should identify the owner.

[sarting]

ahhhh, darn it… this is sorta what i was looking for, but none of those numbers have voicemail enabled… they’re generic numbers used as a second line for our users.

[sarting]

@dicko

dialing ‘direct to voicemail’ (*78701) should identify the owner.

you know… this gave me an idea… if i created a ‘fake’ extension and just forward to the 78701 for example… if i dialed it would that work?

[dicko]

That should work, remember that extensions can be in more than one ring-group, they can also be in follow-me’s

[sarting]

heyyyyy, it worked! thank you!

Basic solution: Create a new extension that’s not registered to anything, go to the advanced tab and change the ‘unreachable’ settings to point to the extensions. To test it, i first pointed it to an IVR to make sure it worked, then pointed it back to a working 787xx number to verify.

Beautiful!