Call Forwarding Inbound DID

With the holidays coming up, I needed to forward calls from our Vicidial into an external number.

Under the Inbound DID Settings:

• Set "DID Route" to EXTEN
• Set "Extension" to dialplan prefix + countrycode + area code + number

Unfortunately, I tested it and found that there is a significant delay with the sounds. On top of that, there is a long silence. I need to find out why there is a long silence and if I can replace that with ringing so the caller doesn't feel like he/she got dropped.

To be continued...

Source:
http://www.vicidial.org/VICIDIALforum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=25793

Deleting Recordings from a Specific Date in Vicidial

How does one delete recordings from a specific date? It's a good thing that vicidial recordings are named by date. In my case, the recordings we use are in MP3 format.

For example here, if I wanted to delete all MP3's from March 19, 2016, I just need to use the command below:

rm -f /var/spool/asterisk/monitorDONE/MP3/20160319*.mp3

It would be helpful in freeing up space if the original .WAV files are also deleted since they eat up a lot of space. This isn't a date-specific command since we only need the MP3's.

rm -f /var/spool/asterisk/monitorDONE/ORIG/*.wav 

To free up more space, check here:
http://simplevicidial.blogspot.com/2016/04/no-mysqlsock-because-root-partition-is.html 

*Another thing I learned: Sometimes, you just need to reboot to free up space.

8 Sockets Detached Only in Asterisk, Can't call Softphone

After my hard drive was full again from recordings, I deleted the extra recordings and then rebooted. After this, the users told me that their X-Lite (our softphone) wasn't being called into the conference anymore.

For those unfamiliar, every time the agent logs into the website of Vicidial, the softphone will ring and will join a conference. Vicidial will dial numbers and when it gets an answered call, it will connect this phone call to the conference.

Upon checking using the "screen -ls" command, there are only 8 sockets detached (vs the usual 9). I found that "astsend" was missing. I assume this is the socket that "sends" the calls to the softphones.

I found 2 suggestions on how to fix it:

1. Recompile Asterisk - I don't know how to do this exactly, but might be worth looking into for those who know how to do this.

2. Perform a Mysql Repair - Thankfully, this was the solution that worked for me! Turns out, when deleting unwanted recordings, it also damaged the mysql database.

mysqlcheck --auto-repair asterisk
sudo reboot

After performing the mysql repair and rebooting, Asterisk now calls my X-lite again.

No More Leads in the Hopper for Campaign

Early this morning, I had to free up some space by deleting unneeded .WAV files. Later in the day, we found out that we couldn't make any outbound calls for all of the campaigns (but we could still receive inbound calls). The error was "No more leads in the hopper for campaign: <campaign name>". This was the same error message regardless of if it was Manual Dialing or Predictive Dialing.

I found the way to identify the issue through Support ALG's blog (see link below).
https://supportalg.blogspot.com/2015/06/how-to-fix-error-this-campaign-has-zero.html

It was the 2nd method that helped me identify the error:

/usr/share/astguiclient/AST_VDhopper.pl --debugX

Sorry, I was only able to get a partial screenshot

Because of this, I was able to identify that the /asterisk/vicidial_list table had crashed. After googling "table vicidial list is marked as crashed", I found this vicidial.org forum thread:
http://www.vicidial.org/VICIDIALforum/viewtopic.php?t=20206

Scrolling down below, I found this command (first when mysql has no password, second has password - you'll only need one of them):

mysqlcheck --auto-repair asterisk vicidial_list
mysqlcheck --auto-repair asterisk vicidial_list -p

Now after running the mysqlcheck, I logged out of and in to the campaign, and I can dial outbound calls again!

Long Silence at the Start of Inbound Calls

It's my first time setting up an inbound call and I ran into a problem where after the initial 2 rings, there's a long silence before the greeting plays. The longest was 17 seconds!

If I were the customer and there was no sound for 17 seconds, I'd hang up immediately. Customers hanging up mid-way isn't a good thing, of course.

Here are the steps I did to remedy the situation:

1. Make sure the DID points to the IP address you need: It will take longer to route the calls to the right place if you have 2 or more servers. I had our DID provider remove the 4 other unnecessary IP addresses which shaved off 10 seconds.
2. [Update: Don't do this! I ended up having a lot of outbound calls dropped because asterisk couldn't find this file] Remove sip-silence.gsm from the sequence: Observing asterisk logs, when an inbound call arrives, sip-silence.gsm is played twice before the first greeting. I'm too scared to tinker with the asterisk script (it's a really long text of code) and remove the 2 lines of sip-silence. Instead, I just renamed sip-silence.gsm into sip-silence2.gsm so it would skip playing that file. This shaved off another 3 seconds. Aside from removing sip-silence.gsm, I was thinking of replacing it with a ringing sound. However, I can't find the default ringing sound in the asterisk folder, so I chose to just remove sip-silence.gsm instead.

From 17 seconds of long silence, I was able to cut it down to 4 seconds of silence.

Converting Sound Files to WAV for Vicidial

I felt like I should post what settings I put in to convert sound files to .wav for Vicidial (For call menus and voicemail greeting). I did it the last time, but I forgot it today. Now, I'm taking down notes so I won't forget in the future.

Link to Online Converter:
http://audio.online-convert.com/convert-to-wav

Settings Needed:

• Change Bit Resolution: 16 Bit
• Change Sampling Rate: 8000 Hz
• Change Audio Channels: Mono
• PCM Format (Under advanced options): PCM Unsigned 8-bit

Anything else higher than this won't work.

Audio Store is Just A White Box

I encountered the "plain white box" error upon clicking any link in the administration which mentions "audio chooser". I also mysteriously found that by clicking this and having the white box issue, the disk space runs out quickly and I have to delete the logs.

By following the instructions here, I was able to fix the problem.
http://striker24x7.blogspot.com/2014/06/vicidial-goautodial-audio-store-white.html

Turns out, the directory that Vicidial was pointing to did not exist. I needed to create the folder and made sure the permissions were okay.

Now, upon clicking the Audio Chooser, this pops up!

P.S. Striker 24x7 - I <3 you!