While trying to get ring groups working today I once again exposed my telephony ignorance, especially concerning FreePBX. I’m using RasPBX which I doubt has anything to do with the issues I’m about to share with you but I feel the more information I provide, the better. Anyway, I have a setup that has been working great but I wanted to change the incoming calls to go to a Ring Group which would include a couple of Android phones that have CSipSimple installed (which have also been working just fine as extensions).
I originally had the Inbound Route sending landline calls to the extension assigned to my Vtech wireless phone system attached through a Grandstream HT503. The Grandstream is also the gateway for the landline as the HT503 is both an FXO and FXS device. That was working just fine. Calls coming in on the landline were routed to the Vtech extension and if no answer then went to that extension’s voicemail.
The weird stuff started happening when I tried to create a ring group and route the incoming landline calls to the ring group. No matter what I do, the Android phone will not ring when calls come in on the landline even though I have the Inbound route destination set as the ring group. I just tested the ring group by diaing it from the Vtech extension and it does actually ring the Android phone so I’m thinking I just have something set wrong or not set up in the right place. The weirdest thing is that even after I took the Vtech phone’s extension out of the ring group the landline calls still ring the Vtech and not the Android phone. Ouch!
I can’t help but wonder if the Grandstream is somehow crossing over directly from the FXO to the FXS side but the caller id name showing up on the Vtech is the one I assigned in the PBX not the one I assigned on the Grandstream.
An off-the-wall option: maybe something in the ring group is using FAX detection, which is effectively answering the call for the group. While it’s not typical, we’ve seen a couple of these in the past few months.
It’s also possible that your gateway device is messing you up as you suggest. Information from /var/log/asterisk/full would be helpful (since the DAHDI interaction would be documented there).
Thanks for the reply Dave. Sorry it took me so long to get back to you… lot’s of things going on on my end. Anyway, I finally found the answer, several answers actually. The main problem was I was not even considering where the Grandstream itself was pointing to as it sent calls to the PBX. On it’s “Basic Settings” page there is a group of fields under a heading titled “Unconditional Call Forward to VOIP”. The first field is “User Id” which I had set to… wait for it… the Vtech phone! I had a head smacking moment when I saw that. Anyway I changed that to point at the ring group and my problem was solved.
But wait, there’s more! I then had the realization that I should have been pointing to the trunk, not the ring group directly. I had actually been trying to get incoming faxes working with the free module and after configuring all of the different screens for that (OMG, there are so many nooks and crannies in this software!) I could not get it to work. The realization that I did not have an incoming SIP trunk configured (I did have an outgoing but that obviously did not help with this issue) set me on the path to correcting all of that neglect. After setting up the incoming trunk I then pointed the Grandstream “User Id” field to the trunk name I had defined and everything started working properly.
Unfortunately my window for testing the FAX setup kind of expired when the business I was working with decided to just mail me the information I needed through the post office (they would not email it). Anyway, the landline now rings once, the Grandstream sends it to the PBX trunk, the default 4 second delay occurs where I assume it is checking for a FAX (which I still want it to do) and then the inbound route drops it into the ring group and all of those phones are now ringing as they should. I’m a happy camper!!!