Penalties/Priorities with Dynamic Agents

*** Sorry if I annoy anyone by posting this to the Trixbox forums as well as here…I intended to post this here first but had some login problems…

I’ve recently learned how to set penalties/priorities on static agents using the ‘ext,penalty’ (200,0) syntax which is working well to give preference to a small subset of agents in a queue, but how do I achieve the same behavior with dynamic agents?

Does the ‘A’ prefix for a static agent have anything to do with this? I see in the tooltips for the Static Agents box a reference to prefacing the extension with an ‘A’ which then has some relevance to agents.conf but I’m not clear on how this works…if you are defining static agents and entering them into the Static Agents box in the first place, what benefit does using the ‘A’ option to reference agents.conf give you? Does it just give you the ability to reference an agent definition in agents.conf where you have the ability to set additional agent options that don’t appear in the GUI? Will this let me set penalties for an agent and make them a dynamic agent as well?

Lastly, until I turned off call waiting for queue agents they continued to receive queue calls even while on one already. I know this has been a known issue in the past that disabling callerid has fixed, but has there been any progress with this that a version upgrade or something might fix? (using FreePBX 2.2.1 currently). It would be nice to leave call waiting enabled and have queues smart enough to move to the next agent if one is already on a call, despite having call waiting enabled…

Thanks for any replies, the community is a fantastic resource.

mmastera

First question, what version of Asterisk are you running and to what extent have you tested with penalties. Last time I spent time with penalties I determined and confirmed with others that they are completely broken. If I could line up the moon and starts in just the right way, I could get them almost working with some anomalies still.

As a result, nothing more has been pursued with penalties wrt to dynamic agents or anything else.

Next, the ‘A’ for agents.conf agents. This has nothing to do with dynamic agents. It was put in to facilitate the use of agents.conf type agents. However, there are issues with using agents.conf agents in the rest of the dialplan. If I recall correctly, things like subsequent transfers to voicemail or other extensions in this mode will not function properly because using Agents bypasses the normal local channel where ‘bookkeeping’ functions take place to ensure correct behavior. Nothing has been investigated or put in the code to determine how this would be handled when using channel agent.

Last, keeping a queue call from ringing a phone when the person is on the line and has CW set. This is something that has had some recent discussion and may happen in the future.

Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx