It seems as if Cisco makes it nearly impossible to make there phones 100% compatible with SIP PBX’s like Trixbox. I recently migrated my companys 20 phones from a Hosted PBX running Call Manager to an in-house Trixbox a few months ago and everything wen through without a hitch thanks to some careful planning. Recently one of my users complained that she was not being notified whe she had a New voicemail waiting. All 20 phones are Cisco 7940’s that are running the POS3-8-12-00 Firmware. As I started to look into the issue I came across multiple forum threds citing the issue and each had their own way to solve. As you probably already know the 79xx series has a red light on the handset and an icon on the phone screen call the “Message Waiting Indicator”. One of the threads stated that the extension were incorrectly configured under the Mailbox textbox. They should have said XXX@default instead of XXX@device. This is a bug in asterisk and must be fixed manually. In my case this did not work. I had some phones that were working so I compared the configurations to those that were not working and found that the @default does not necesarrly work. It only works if default is the Voicemail Context. Good for us that under the configuration for Voicemail it has a field called Voicemail Context. All you need to do is replace what comes after the “@” in the Mailbox field with whats in the “Voicemail Context” field.
Its extreamly simple. I have only tested this on the 7940 but I am fairly confident that it should work for almost any phone in the 79xx series and may be even other SIP phones.
If your still running into issue after going through these steps feel free to leave a comment and I’ll be glad to help out.
#1 by brad - July 27th, 2010 at 11:34
I have this issue and can’t figure out why some of the extensions were put under the @default context while others, @device (VM context states “other”). I changed one of my users that has the context @device/other to @default/default and his mailbox was recreated, deleting all of the voicemails along with his greeting messages. So for the rest of the users I am trying to find out how to enable MWI regardless of the context.
#2 by Jorge Fernandez - July 27th, 2010 at 11:49
In my case I have some under the “other” context as well I believe I used the bulk extension import feature to add them to trixbox. is that the same in your case? All the new extensions i’ve added manually go directly to the “default” context. You can manually change the vm context to the same context that is under the mailbox for the extension as long as those are the same MWI should work so if the “Mailbox = 1111@other” then “vm context = other”
#3 by Jorge Fernandez - July 27th, 2010 at 12:00
Woops i got that backwards. The vm context is the the one thats right and the mailbox the one thats wrong. So if “vm context = other” then “mailbox = 1111@other”
#4 by Brad - August 5th, 2010 at 12:57
Yeah, that worked. Thanks!
#5 by Scott - February 27th, 2011 at 11:21
Awesome! I changed both contexts to default (VM was already set to that.) and it works perfectly now! Thanks!
#6 by omar - April 10th, 2011 at 09:47
Could you point me where are the file to modified?
#7 by Jorge Fernandez - April 10th, 2011 at 10:14
This is all done through the FreePBX interface. I you need to do it via config files it would probably be in sip.conf (/etc/asterisk/sip.conf). But im not 100% sure. It also varies based upon the Asterisk distribution… What distro are u using? I’m running trixbox but there should be no issues making the change above with any distro that uses FreePBX.
#8 by omar - April 10th, 2011 at 10:30
I’m using asterisknow with AsteriskGUI 1.6
#9 by R Vass - November 14th, 2011 at 08:19
Worked a dream
Thanks