I have been working with a customer of mine on a FreePBX system. I am new to FreePBX but did a lot of research and read up on documentation before attempting this project. I’m already familiar with a couple other phone systems and didn’t see FreePBX being an issue for me.
What am I trying to do?
Customer contacted stating CID and Ring Groups were not working properly. Inspected and found that current system was sub optimal for what they were trying to do. They have several reps that need to be part of the ring group and be able to answer these calls. Also, they need the original caller ID to pass through as it’s going to an external phone number.
All that should be needing done is set up a queue and use the Follow Me with extensions to make this possible which is what I did
What’s the problem?
I got everything set up. I set up and extension for Follow Me and to be used specifically for the Queue I was setting them up with. I then created the queue and specified the “ringall” attribute. It is set up quite simply. I increased the ring times to allow the calls to come on if they’re lagging behind a bit. There’s no “Call Accept” turned on or anything fancy. If the queue is not answered it redirects to the voicemail.
I had 3 external phone numbers set up in follow me under the extension I was using set up as following
(XXXXXXXXXX#)
The last thing they wanted was to be able to transfer to another rep inside the company from their phone. Awesome, I was able to figure that out and get everything they requested working.
There was now a queue which was more efficiently handling the calls coming in, there was a follow me set up facilitating the CID pass through, and they were able to transfer to another rep from their cell phone.
Everything was working as intended and customer was happy! Apparently when they shut down their computer these changes almost “reverted” and they stopped working immediately after shutting the computer down
NOTE: the computer that was shut down was not their server just a local computer making changes to the PBX server.
When I get in this morning everything looks normal as I set it up the day before but it is just flat out not working with the Queue anymore.
What have I done to fix this?
I went through and started with the simple thing first. Reverting any changes I made back to how they were. They were running off a ring group previously so I set that back up going through their IVR. That refused to work either. I tried altering some miscellaneous settings that I thought could be causing the issue but very unlikely and it still did not fix it.
Now, I went and added a Misc. Destination for my personal number and when I directed to that over the IVR it worked just fine. So, I put my number in the Queue and attempted to troubleshoot. The queue would flat out not function at all. I checked Asterisk logs and it’s telling me it’s rejecting the call going to the reps.
I spent about another couple hours trying to get at least their old way of doing it back up but I couldn’t. The only thing I could do for them in the meantime was set up a phone to the Misc Destination through the IVR.
What in the world happened and why is this not working anymore even after I had confirmed it working? Why can’t I revert back and it start working with the old ring group instead of the queue?
I do understand when making changes you have to save and commit which I had been religiously doing to make sure no changes were lost.
I’m hoping I just don’t know enough about FreePBX and I’m missing something simple but I don’t know how it can go from working to not working in the span of a couple hours… and then not be able to get it working again.
I know they’re running a pretty outdated version I think by a year and a half. I came to the conclusion though that it SHOULDNT be the issue, but I’ve been wrong before.
Any help or guidance would be appreciated.