Not playing audio & accepting dial pad input from outside lines

Hi, so i’m a college intern working at my cousins company and i’ve been assigned the task of working on setting up the companies phone system (with help of course), and well FreePBX seems to hate me! )=

I have inconsistently been having a few problems:

1) We don’t receive ANY audio (may it be the ringer, the voice mail message, or the person talking) when calls are made to or from any outside lines. The outside caller can hear us, we just can’t hear them. This problem occurs only when i’m receiving or sending calls to outside numbers. I’m fairly sure that this has always been the case, but there may have been one or two cases where the call may have worked properly once or twice with Skype (but again i’m not 100% certain). We tried to leave a voicemail on one of the internal extensions. Although a voicemail was left when i tried to play it on the computer quicktime said it was 0 second long (that might be an issue with my computer), when i tried to play it on that extension i heard absolutely nothing (not even static…), and when i tried to download the message onto my mac it didn’t play anything (and i know .wav files work because i am able to play the .wav files that i uploaded as a operator greeting.)

2) We have set it up such that all calls made are are forwarded to an IVR functioning as an operator (press ‘one’ for ‘this’ extension, press ‘two’ for ‘that’ extension) but most of the time it seems to just not accept input. Strangely this problem seems to be on and of, but as far as i can recollect the only times it has worked is when the IVR has no initial announcement, but then when i went back and turned on the announcement it immediately stopped working, and continued to do so even when i turned off the announcement 99.999% of the time. This problem doesn’t seem to be effected by the ‘timeout message’ or the 'invalid message’.

3) The time out command for my Operator IVR doesn’t seem to work. When the time out time is reached the call isn’t forwarded to the designated extension, instead the call just ends. (one thing about the time out thing is that I’m not entirely sure i set up the time out command thing correctly but here’s a screen shot of my IVR page for you guys to look at and see)

4) My time out message is extremely inconsistent, although there are times that it will randomly work, most of the time it just chooses not to and rudely disconnects the call without saying anything.


I figure the first two problems are related due to the fact that they both have to do with input from outside numbers, but i seem to be utterly clueless for the ‘third’ and ‘fourth’ problem (although i do see the possibility that the ‘second’ and ‘third’ problem are connected).

I know the first response to this will be to check and make sure our firewall isn’t causing the problem and we already have, several times, as that we had in the past run into other problems due to the firewall.

if you’ve read through all this mess thanks very much and please please please throw in your two cents (no mater how worthless it may seem) I’ve spent at leaset 2 days looking around for what to do and all that turns up is “check your firewall.” all other comments seem to be geared toward issues with things like trixbox which we aren’t using (although we are looking into using it).

So please help an innocent little college intern out!

Make sure your router is set up to allow the correct ports to the correct IP address to your Server or you will get one way audio on in or out, normally inbound audio which is why you are not hearing a ring or many other functions.

Ports to forward are:

My Settings are these due to software I run but should be fine on your setup.

Ports 5060 - 5062 UDP - server ip
Ports 10000 - 20000 UDP - server ip —>> This can be a smaller range if you want. I.E. 10000 - 14000 UDP should also work.
Ports 10000 - 20000 UDP is what is recommended for most applications.
Ports 4569 - 4569 UDP - server ip… This is not used unless connecting IAX I believe.

Forward these ports on your router and retry…

Ah thanks that fixed the audio problem but the problem with the operator’s dial pad still persists. It worked this morning without an announcement but when i added oen it stopped working

thanks but the other operator dialer problem still persists