Using Routes

About Routes.

SARK UCS/MVP _ Routes Panel is the place where Route entities are declared. A route is a defined set of pathways which will carry a particular class of telephone number. For example you might declare a route called _LOCAL which is sensitive to short, local-exchange numbers and it will define a pathway for these numbers using PSTN lines. You might declare another route called NATIONAL which defines how national calls are to be carried and over which trunks. You might declare a route called USA which defines those carriers who can recognise a US domestic number and so on. Routes give you a great deal of flexibility in the way that you classify and handle different types of outbound call.

Routes are also used to distribute extension groups across multiple servers. A special carrier type; Sibling, can be used to define IAX or SIP trunks which carry traffic between servers. In this way you can have, for example, extensions 5000-5019 on server A, extensions 5020-5039 on server B and extensions 5040-5059 on server C. The extensions on each server can, in turn, use routes which share the available bandwidth of the whole server group for VOIP, Analogue, conferencing and mail facilities. For example all your conference rooms may exist on server A while all of your VOIP carriers are known only to server B. Individual users neither know nor care where these services are, they simply use them. Call forward instructions also operate happily across servers as do vmail and e-mail services (with some restrictions - see the section on distributed Vmail in the Headers Topic).

Setting up a Route to handle local traffic

Open the create new route panel. Let's suppose that your local numbers are either 6 digit beginning with either a 5 or a 6, or 8 digit beginning 81. You will also want to handle local telco calls through this route (although you could set up another) together with emergency services and so on.

By convention we use block capitals to name a route. Let's call this route LOCAL. Choose any ZAP line as your primary trunk. If there are sibling trunks available which connect to siblings which own analogue lines you may want to choose them as failover paths. Now for the dial plan, it will look something like this...

• • _[56]XXXXX _81XXXXXX 151 152 811 911 100 118118

The two masks handle local numbers while the other number sequences handle Telco and emergency service calls. Finally, give your route a description and press SAVE.

Setting up a Route to handle inter node extensions

Let's suppose you have two SAIL servers running. Let's call them SAIL5000 and SAIL6000. SAIL5000 has all of the 5000 range extensions and SAIL6000 has all of the 6000 range extensions. On SAIL5000 set up a route called SAIL6000, using the sibling trunk to SAIL6000, with a dial plan...

• • _6XXX

Similarly on SAIL6000 set up a route called SAIL5000, using the sibling trunk to SAIL5000, with a dial plan...

• • _5XXX

That's it, you're done, you can now dial any extension on any server from any extension on any server. Of couse these servers can be on the same LAN or remote from one another. Instant distributed telephony!

Maybe you just want to have conference rooms on SAIL6000. Let's say they are 300 thru 307. Modify the SAIL5000 dial plan as follows...

• • _6XXX _30[0-7]

Done. Now everyone can use the conference rooms on SAIL6000 from either server.