Issue lighting up BLF on used phone line

[GamerSam (Samuel Gottschall)]

Hey all, I’m having issues with getting my BLF to behave how me and my Boss want it too.
I’m also seeking help over here since we are using Cisco SPA509G model phones Cisco Help Thread.
Anyway, my boss wants our BLF to stay lit on the phone lines that are currently in use. Right now, whenever We answer the call on an extension, which is assigned to each phone, it lights up only for that extension. We wnat it so it lights up for both the phone line and the phone. Is there something in the FreePBX system I can change so it does so? I’m still relatively new to all this.

[arielgrin]

That seems extremely similar to SLA, and that is not easy to implement on asterisk. Remember that the concept of phone line is irrelevant in VoIP, at least when using pure SIP. If your phone lines are analog and they connect to your FreePBX through DAHDI hardware, then it should be possible to monitor each FXO port.

[GamerSam (Samuel Gottschall)]

They are Analog ports configured through DAHDI hardware using FXO ports. Should I look into SLA then?

[arielgrin]

There is no need to go “full” SLA if you just want monitoring. If that’s the case, just create a hint for every FXO port that you want monitored and then configure those hints on BLF keys. That will give you monitoring. If you want to add call barging the way key systems used to do, that is when you need to start fiddling with SLA (Shared Line Appearance)
Be advised, though, that if you look for SLA on this forum, you’re probably in for a heated discussion, as many believe that SLA belongs to the past, appart from the fact that regarding Asterisk, SLA is only moderately easy to achieve only for analog PSTN lines and nothing else.

[arielgrin]

Take a look at this post, it starts as a question on how to monitor FXO ports, just like your question, but then expands on to SLA and the discussion I was previously referring to before. I won’t make any judgement about it, as I understand both positions.

How to monitor Dhadi channels with a BLF key and also use it to make calls?

Hello all, I was wondering if anybody knows the solution for this. I have an OpenVox A400P04 with 4 FXO modules and Yealink T29G handsets. I want to program 4 DSS keys on the Yealinks to act as follows: a) As BLF in order to see the status of those channels individually & b) As line selectors (in order to press them and make a call using those channels/lines) Note that I also have 4 prefixes programmed in the dialplan in order to route outgoing calls via each channel (81, 82, 83, 84). Thos…

[GamerSam (Samuel Gottschall)]

thanks for the link, I’ll check out out.

[arielgrin]

Basically, you want the following, provided you just want the key to only monitor the lines but do nothing when pressed.

This part has been extracted from another post made by Lorne Gatz, so kudos to him for that

In the file /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf add lines like these in the existing [from-internal-custom] section:

[from-internal-custom]
exten=> *00001,hint,DAHDI/1
exten=> *00002,hint,DAHDI/2
exten=> *00003,hint,DAHDI/3
exten=> *00004,hint,DAHDI/4

Reload the dialplan, then program a BLF on your phone with the code “*00001” (no quotes) and the BLF will illuminate whenever DAHDI channel 1 is inuse and so on.

The codes can be whatever you want, they don’t need to be exactly the same as the ones above, just make sure you are not using any codes already in use by anything else.