Asterisk Registrations – State?

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Hi.

I’m using Asterisk 16.2.1 with some registrations (ie: my Asterisk server is registering to other PBXs as though it were a telephone).

Is there any way I can get presence / state information from those PBXs in the same way that a registered telephone can?

In other words, can I send a Subscribe request to the PBX so that I get Notify announcements about other extensions and whether they’re idle / busy / ringing
/ etc., the same as BLF indicators on a SIP phone can do?

I’ve looked at https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Querying+and+Manipulating+State but this appears to be only for the state of clients registered to my Asterisk instance, not for the state of clients registered to the same remote PBX as Asterisk itself is registering to.

Thanks,

Antony.

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5 thoughts on - Asterisk Registrations – State?

  • Hi.

    Does nobody have any ideas / suggestions about this?

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  • There is no functionality present to have Asterisk SUBSCRIBE to upstream servers, receive updates, and locally use them.

  • Hm, thanks for the clarification, this confirms what I suspected.

    Can anyone suggest an alternative application I could sensibly use alongside Asterisk in a production environment to achieve this (I’m specifically looking for a way to maintain presence information for a Busy Lamp Field, and to get notifications about Voicemail events).

    I’m aware of both SIPp https://github.com/SIPp/sipp and SipSak https://github.com/nils-ohlmeier/sipsak, however these are (to me at least)
    testing scenario tools designed for “short term” use to place and receive calls, rather than maintaining long-term subscriptions to SIP accounts, waiting for notifications of events, so I’m somewhat wary about considering them for use in a production environment (by which I mean I’m looking for something which can subscribe to a few tens of SIP accounts (across several servers) and get the event notifications for those accounts, over a period of days and weeks, and pass them to my display application in almost any reasonable form).

    Any ideas out there?

    Thanks,

    Antony.

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  • It sounds to me like you just need a reasonable SIP softphone that can register with multiple SIP accounts (they all do) and show presence for the extension registered (I think most want you to pay for this feature versus the freebie client).

    Why run asterisk?

    Am I missing something?

    Cheers,

  • Oh, certainly – there’s a whole load I didn’t mention in my description 🙂

    I’m using Asterisk to place and receive calls through the external PBX systems
    – it’s registered as a SIP client, and essentially behaves as a soft phone as far as the external PBXs are concerned.

    Alongside placing and receiving calls, though, I need the presence and voicemail information, therefore I’m looking for a reasonable way to combine that with Asterisk which handles the calls themselves perfectly fine.

    And, before anyone suggests it, no, I can’t simply replace Asterisk with an actual softphone application, because there’s a very complicated dialplan behind all this, including directing calls up SIP trunks quite separately from the SIP registrations to the PBXs.

    Thanks,

    Antony.

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