A couple of years ago I went through a couple of iterations of CME to Asterisk integration. Since then we've been running fairly reliably with the Cisco 1760 router behaving purely as a SIP based gateway and Asterisk managing everything else. I've run our Cisco phones as SCCP using the chan_sccp on Asterisk.
Due to some recent purchases and the fact that I don't have ACPI figured out on the laptop Asterisk is running on, I've decided to change the configuration a bit. I need the memory and the charger from that laptop so that version of Asterisk has got to go.
What I'll be doing is going back to the 1760 as CME and not just the voice gateway. There was always something a little funky about chan_sccp on Asterisk so having the call control back in the hands of Cisco should work better. In trying to get to the most current version of CME on the 1760 I've discovered something. I have 96/32 for the memory/flash and the "recommended" configuration is 128/64 for CME4.0 and later. As far as I can tell CME4.2 isn't supported on the 1760 at all. I was tempted to try it but that IOS version wasn't available and the T train doesn't seem to have progressed enough to make it by with that alone. So, I tried CME4.1 since 12.4(15)T is available for the 1760. It works! So far! I've only attached a single phone to it and there was no way I could copy the entire CME installation over. If I had a diverse mix of phones I'd be out of flash space but I only needed the files for the 7940/60 and the 7920 so it fits. Barely.
I spent the better part of last night getting CME configured again on the 1760. Phone registers, no problem. I set up AsteriskNow virtually and connected an IAX softphone to it. Also, no problem. After some tweaking of the Asterisk config and reminding myself how context's work I was able to make calls back and forth between a 7940 registered to CME and the IAX softphone. I then got the voicemail button working on the 7940. Also, not a problem.
Now I'm stuck. I can't get the MWI to work. Voicemail works, no problem. Just doesn't seem to be sending the MWI to the CME. Even running a debug on the CME shows no activity related to the MWI. So, I've got something misconfigured on Asterisk.
I'll continue to poke at the MWI problem. Once I have a working config I'll post the details so maybe someone else can benefit from this.
Tags: CiscoRouting and Switching, Networking, VoIP