Page 144 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

disallow=all
allow=ulaw
dtmfmode=rfc2833
maibox=1002
secret=AllYourSetsAreBelongToUs
Seems like a lot of extra typing, cutting, and pasting, yes? And what if you decide that
you are going to change the context for your sets to another name. Not looking good,
is it?
Enter the template. Let’s create the same SIP friends as we did above, only this time
using the template construct:

[sets](!) ; <== note the exclamation point in parenthesis. That makes this a template.
type=friend
context=internal
host=dynamic
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
dtmfmode=rfc2833
secret=AllYourSetsAreBelongToUs
[1000](sets) ; <== note the template name in parenthesis. All of that templates
; settings will be inhereted.
maibox=1000
[1001](sets)
maibox=1001

[1002](sets)
maibox=1002
This is one of the best kept secrets of conf file creation. In our experience, very few
people use this, but for no other reason than that they don’t know about it. Well, that’s
about to change. Our goal is to see everyone using these from now on; and yes, we will
be checking.

Debugging

Several methods of debugging are available in Asterisk. Once you’ve connected to the
console, you can enable different levels of verbosity and debugging output, as well as
protocol packet tracing. We’ll take a look at the various options in this section.

Connecting to the Console

To connect to the Asterisk console, you can either start the server in the console directly
(in which case you will not be able to exit out of the console without killing the Asterisk
process), or start Asterisk as a daemon and then connect to a remote console.
To start the Asterisk process directly in the console, use the console flag:

116 | Chapter 4: Initial Configuration of Asterisk