Newbie help for routing calls inbound

General Help
1

I’ve got what I think should be a basic question about how things are SUPPOSED to work… I’m trying to learn asterisk from the perspective of a Cisco Call Manager geek…

I’ve got a brand new AsteriskNow installation, with one VOIP trunk and one softphone. I’ve got outbound calling from the softphone working, but inbound doesn’t work… I can see in the logs that the call comes in as “phone number@from-sip-external” and then it is transferred to “the number you have called is not in service”.

I have an inbound route setup with no DID, with a destination of my working extension of 101, but it’s not taking that route.

Best I can tell, it’s got something to do with the fact that the call is coming in on one context and my extension is in another, but what I’m NOT clear on, is how to fix this without giving up and setting everything in my system to the same context name so that anything can call anything. I think I can get it to work by doing that, but I think I’d rather learn how this is SUPPOSED to work, rather than give up on a fundamental feature of the system…

Can someone point me to a good tutorial on how the contexts are supposed to interact… hopefully specific to FreePBX, assuming I’m not supposed to leave the GUI and start editing my .conf files manually?

Thanks!

2

You definitely don’t want EVERYthing in the same context! For understanding Asterisk contexts and everything, check out the asterisk wiki (quick google search will get you there).

3

https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Contexts%2C+Extensions%2C+and+Priorities

Here is a direct link to the contexts section on the Asterisk Wiki

4

Thanks for the reply, but my question is really more FreePBX related… I see the include statements in the extensions.conf file when you manage the asterisk via the text configuration files directly, but I’m not sure how to do the same thing with the FreePBX GUI. If I edit the configuration files directly, wont FreePBX just overwrite my changes?

5

For each of the configuration files in a FreePBX install, they split them up, as you’ve probably seen. Put your own custom code in the *_custom.conf files. So for adding custom dialplan, add your code to extensions_custom.conf. The custom files are included in the base configuration files.