[cisco-voip] Is It Possible To Dial A PLAR Configured Line?

[Gary Parker]

Morning all, I'm setting up a bunch of phones for a new building on campus that's operating as a small hotel, for all intents and purposes. Here's a quick summary of the configuration:

	• two 8851s on reception, two 7841s in the office and a 7841 in the kitchen, two 7832s in meeting rooms
	• they want to be separate from the rest of campus, from a telephony point of view, so office, meeting room, kitchen and reception phones have all gone into their own partition (EAC_PT)
	• there's a hunt pilot for the main number (that distributes calls to reception and the office)
	• shared line on the two reception phones and shared line on the two office phones
	• BLFSD pickups on all those phones with a pickup group containing office, reception and kitchen phones (only reception has the meeting rooms)
That's all working nicely. Now, the problem is that I also have 49x 6901s for the rooms and corridors. The client specified (against my better judgement) that they only be able to call reception, so I've configured them all for PLAR as per this guide. The PLAR is working fine, calls go to the reception hunt pilot as soon as the handset is lifted and reception can then forward them on to wherever they like, in our out of the organisation. They're in the EAC_PLAR_PT partition.

My problem is that I'd also like to be able to call those rooms from the handsets in the EAC_PT partition. Adding the EAC_PLAR_PT to the CSS in use by those handsets, however, causes them to also behave as if they were PLAR configured. Just having the EAC_PLAR_PT (with its translation pattern) in the CSS, no matter its position in the partition order, causes the other handsets to replicate the room handset PLAR behaviour.

This didn't immediately manifest itself, though. As the room/corridor phones are all SCCP I only did the SCCP part of the PLAR config. Consequently, going off-hook with the other phones (all SIP) didn't invoke the PLAR behaviour and calls could be made to EAC_PT, EAC_PLAR_PT and the wider world. Problems arose, however, when trying to use the pickup functionality within the office. As the phone essentially dials the pickup group number it was hitting the translation pattern in EAC_PLAR_PT and instead dialling the reception hunt pilot. Taking the EAC_PLAR_PT out of their CSS returns pickup functionality, but I can no longer dial the rooms.

I replicated the config of one of the office 7841s to a 6921 in the EAC_PT and, with the EAC_PLAR_PT in its line CSS, observed automatic dialling to reception when the handset was lifted. Again, removing the EAC_PLAR_PT from its line CSS restored calling and pickup functionality, but I'm now unable to dial the handsets in EAC_PLAR_PT.

How can I dial the lines in the EAC_PLAR_PT? Is it possible or is it a side-effect of PLAR that the lines become unreachable? Can anyone suggest a better way of doing this? I'd really like to avoid providing dial-tone to these rooms with a restricted CSS.


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/-Gary Parker----------------------------------f--\
|     Unified Communications Service Manager      |
n      Loughborough University, IT Services       |
|     tel:+441509635635 sip:gary at lboro.ac.uk      o
|        https://www.osx.ninja/pubkey.txt         |
\r----------------------------------------------d-/

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