I recently setup a hosted Elastix PBX (Asterisk) in conjunction with three Cisco SPA 5xx phones and couldn’t find a simple instruction set to get shared line appearances / bridged line appearances working. I have created this tutorial to show you how to make this happen in less than 5 minutes. The following will allow you not only to see the bridged appearance, but use the button as a transfer destination and to pickup ringing calls on the appearance as well!
Step 1: Configure your Elastic PBX
- Login to your Elastix PBX and select the PBX tab.
- Now select Extensions.
- Pick the extension you wish to “share” or “bridge” and assign a call group and pickup group. In the example below you can see that I have set the pickup group and call group to “1″. Hit the “Submit” button at the bottom of the page, and “Apply Your Configuration Changes” to Asterisk/Elastix.
- Now pick the Extension you wish to connect to the shared or bridged extension and make sure that it is a member of the same call and pickup groups as displayed above. Basically both the source extension and the bridged extension should look like the above.
Step 2: Configure your Linksys or Cisco SPA phones:
- NOTE: It is IMPERATIVE that you are using “Ext 1″ as your primary SIP extension or this will NOT WORK! If “Ext 1″ is disabled you will never get this working! You’ve been warned.
- Login to the web interface of your Cisco or Linksys phone. Click on Admin Logon, then click Advanced.
In this example we will be configuring a Cisco SPA 504G. Please make sure that you are on the LATEST firmware. My phones are running the latest 7.4.9c. - The first step is to configure the phone as an “Asterisk” phone by changing the configuration parameters in the “Attendant Console” or “Attendant Keys” section. You will also need to assign the “Attendant Console Call Pickup Code to “*8″to match the Elastix feature code configuration as displayed below.
- Click on the “Ext 1″ tab and scroll down to “Dial Plan”. Add a “*8xxxx” code (“*8xxx” for 3 digit extensions, or “*8xxxx” for 4 digit extensions) in your dial plan for “Ext 1″ so that your bridged phone can pickup ringing BLFs. See the example below:
- Now, the last step. Actually adding the bridged appearance to the destination phone. Click on the “Phone” tab and pick the desired Line Key you wish to have your bridged appearance on. In the example below you’ll see that I’m bridging extension 1100. Set extension “Extension” to “Disabled” and set “Shared Call Appearance” to “Private”.
- For the “Extended Function String” use the following syntax, replacing 1100 with the source extension you wish to bridge:
fnc=sd+blf+cp;sub=1100@$PROXY;usr=1100@$PROXY;nme=1100
Here’s what it looks like in the SPA interface:
- Congratulations, you’re done! Now commit the settings to the phone by clicking “Submit All Changes” button at the bottom of the page.
If you need to troubleshoot whether this is working, you can go into the asterisk console (“asterisk -r”) and type “core show hints”. Every extension that is connected to the source extension is considered a “Watcher”. In the example below there are 2 extensions bridged to extension 1100.
You are now a Cisco/Linksys SPA bridged/shared line appearance expert!
You probably found this page by Googling “NAD-2902″ error. I have a client who just had business-grade IP DSL (UVerse) from AT&T installed and received the following message when randomly browsing the web:
WARNING:
Potential Connection Issue (Message ID: NAD-2902)The Motorola NVG510 device has detected potential problems with your DSL connection which may impact your service. This problem is often caused by a phone or other device which is connected to your phone line (such as a fax machine, satellite receiver, alarm system or medical monitor) that does not have a DSL filter.
Please check that all telephone equipment is attached to a DSL filter and that all filters are properly installed (e.g., are not installed backwards).
Click the “Do not show” button to permanently disable this warning in the future.
Click on the “Continue” button to notify you in the future if this situation persists.
After talking to AT&T tech support, it turns out this error is a false-positive. The tech I spoke with says this error even occurs with dry-line IP DSL which doesn’t require filters. The engineers at AT&T are aware of the issue and unfortunately there is no fix at present, but they expect to roll out a firmware update in the very near future to rectify this (as of 2/15/12).
When the client complained about the error, I was still able to access the client’s VPN and their e-mail was still flowing… so the circuit indeed was still up and unaffected. Investigating the logs I found that the line had not disconnected once. I had them click the “Do Not Show” button…. but then, problem #2 arose:
The browser will cache the NAD-2902 page for whatever site the end user was trying to bring up at the time the error was presented. As a temporary work-around I have set Internet Explorer’s caching settings for systems behind this circuit to not check “Automatically” for new pages, but to check on every start up of Internet Explorer as shown below. This setting can be accessed in Tools, Internet Options, Browsing History Settings, and changing the “Temporary Internet Files” check to “Every time I start Internet Explorer” or “Every time I visit the webpage”. So god forbid, you get the error, you simply close IE, reload and you should be good to go.
Nice work AT&T! (Insert sarcasm here)
Every time I boot up my Mac I wanted iTunes loaded so all my iDevices could sync, as well as having my movie and music library accessible from my AppleTVs. One annoyance with this is that you cannot hide the iTunes window when it comes up. Every time I booted my computer I had to manually close the iTunes window.
To remedy this, I created a two-line AppleScript application called “Launch iTunes & Close Window”
The source code is:
tell application "iTunes" to launch tell application "iTunes" to close window "iTunes"
- Download and open the Apple disk image.
- Drag the Application from the disk image into your “Applications” or “Utilities” folder.
- Open System Preferences, User Accounts
- Choose the logon account you wish to add the app to.
- Click the “Login Items” tab
- Drag the “Launch iTunes & Close Window” application into the login items pane.
If you are receiving the “Apple ID is valid but is not an iCloud account.” error after upgrading to 10.7.2 on your Hackintosh when attempting to logon to iCloud, you most likely just need to update your Chameleon or Chimera to the latest (I recommend Chimera).
Chimera can be found here from tonymacx86.
For me, just the Chimera update fixed my logon problems. However, if the Chimera update does not solve your issues, you may have an issue with your built in network interfaces or a bad serial number. If you cannot logon to iCloud after the Chimera update, try the following to reset your network settings on your Hackintosh:
1. Remove all network devices from System Preferences > Network. It should look like this when you are done (and you will have no Internet access until completing the next steps):
2. If they don’t exist, add the following lines to the <dict> section of your boot plist in /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist (for newer versions of Chameleon/Chimera):
<key>EthernetBuiltIn</key> <string>Yes</string>
Others have reported that you need to add the following lines as well, but I don’t have them present and my iCloud works:
<key>PCIRootUID</key> <string>1</string>
My <dict> portion of my com.chameleon.Boot.plist looks like this:
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=i386</string>
<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>2</string>
<key>Legacy Logo</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>EthernetBuiltIn</key>
<string>Yes</string>
</dict>
3. Delete /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist
4. Delete /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.network.identification.plist
5. Reboot your computer. Both the files deleted above will be automatically recreated.
6. Go back to System Preferences > Network and add your network devices, STARTING with Ethernet type as the first Ethernet interface (do not use WiFi as the first interface!).
After you hit “Apply”, your top interface should be the wired interface at en0:
Hopefully your iCloud and App Store is working at this point.
If you are still having issues (most likely due to a bad system type/serial):
Download and run Multibeast for Lion and update your system definition (Customization, System Definitions):
For good measure here’s my System Report so you can compare your system type, etc.:
Recently a client of mine who has an Audi A7 couldn’t get his HTC Thunderbolt’s address book/contacts to sync with the Audi MMI over Bluetooth.
The workaround, which I found here:
- Unpair/Delete the phone from the Audi MMI
- Remove the Audi pairing from the HTC Droid (unpair)
- Re-pair the Audi to the HTC Droid
- When the phone pops up with the “Audi MMI wants to access your contact lists, Allow or Deny?”
Hit DENY numerous times. After the 5-6th DENY all your contacts will sync.
Makes no sense and is totally counter-intuitive, but it works!
I use Apple Time Machine to backup my MacBook to a Mac Pro over my LAN/WiFi network using the Snow Leopard AFP time machine hack. Recently the MacBook’s hard disk totally failed and I needed to mount the disk image on the Mac Pro to pull a few critical files off immediately. The sparsebundle appeared in Finder as a folder with a small red minus sign, meaning my user account didn’t have permission to access it.
When I attempted to open the backup image I received an error stating “You do not have permission to open the document MacBook”. Note: “MacBook” was the name of the system Time Machine was backing up.
After approximately an hour of experimentation and research, I found the fix:
Open Terminal in Applications/System Utilities.
“cd” to the folder where your sparsebundle file resides.
(i.e. cd “/Volumes/Media/Time Machine”)sudo chown -R `id -un`:`id -gn` MyTimeMachineBackup.sparsebundle
Enter your password.
Note the “`” quotes above are the slant-quote on your tilde key
on the top left of your Apple keyboard below the “esc” key.
You should now be able to access and mount the image.