Testing to Ensure Your Devices Have Registered

Once your device has registered to Asterisk, you will be able to query the location and state of the device from the Asterisk CLI.

Note

It is a common misconception that registration is how a device authenticates itself for the purpose of obtaining permission to make calls. This is incorrect. The only purpose of registration is to allow a device to identify its location on the network, so that Asterisk[53] knows where to send calls intended for that device.

Authentication for outgoing calls is an entirely separate process and always happens on a per-call basis, regardless of whether a set has registered. This means that your set may be able to make calls, but not receive them. This will normally happen when the set has not registered successfully (so Asterisk does not know where it is), and yet has the correct credentials for making calls (so Asterisk is willing to accept calls from it).

To check the registration status of a device, simply call up the Asterisk CLI:

$ sudo asterisk -r

Typing the following command returns a listing of all the peers that Asterisk knows about (regardless of their state):

*CLI> sip show peers
Name/username              Host            Dyn Nat ACL Port     Status
0000FFFF0001/0000FFFF0001    192.168.1.100    D   N      5060     Unmonitored
0000FFFF0002/0000FFFF0002    192.168.1.101    D   N      5060     Unmonitored

Note

You may notice that the Name/username field does not always show the full name of the device. This is because this field is limited to 25 characters.

Note that the Status in our example is set to Unmonitored. This is because we are not using the qualify=yes option in our sip.conf file.



[53] Or any other SIP registrar server, for that matter.