After restoring a backup on a fresh FreePBX ISO install I had an odd (but familiar) issue occur where inbound calls were getting sent straight to VM. This behavior survived system reboots, and was only resolved by going down the extension list in the gui and reloading. This installs main DID is sent to a ring group, and each extension needed to be reloaded before that particular extension would ring.
Has this happened to anyone else? I would like to get my head around how it would be possible to happen given the restore process had written the correct extension data into the configs, or what reloading the extensions would have cleaned up.
I have had this happen before on PIAF & Trixbox previously over the past 2~3 years where restoring was done and not sure if it could possibly be user error, or a bug in the backup/restore module, FreePBX, Asterisk, or just one of those things.
From memory, I was getting an error msg in the logs that suggested the phones were busy:
‘dialparties returned no extensions to call and dialstatus noanswer’ (or something like this)
keep in mind, when you restore from a full backup, you are wiping out most of the current system.
The best way to restore is to first bring the system up to the latest release before doing the backup and then restore to the new system that is on the same release.
Older versions of backup sometimes had problems with backing up the astdb database which is internal to Asterisk. Or there are times when it is backed up but doesn’t get restored for some reason and you need to manually pull it out of the archive and run the restore against it to get it loaded.
The most common reason for your described issue is this, since the entire state of internal devices and extensions (and a lot more) is contained within the astdb. Going to each extension and editing it re-populates the core essential information for each extension thus bringing the system back to life. There’s also a magic URL that will do much of this for you. Off the top of my head I believe it’s “?display=extension&action=resetall” but … I can never remember so that may not be it, I usually have to look it up in the code or my slides for the FreePBX training class I wrote and give…