The Fugue

I was setting up ChanSpy in an Asterisk dialplan today and it just wasn't working. Here is the snippet:

exten => 501,1,ChanSpy()

I would be connected, and the Asterisk console would tell me I was spying on people, but I would hear nothing at all. For the record, the calls I was spying on were all sorts, but mostly Zap, and I was spying from a SIP softphone.

After some blind fiddling, I found this combination works:

exten => 501,1,ChanSpy(,b)

The b option is "only spy on channels involved in a bridged call". I don't know why this fixes it, but it does.

For the record, it's working great even when calls are being recorded (with MixMonitor), without setting transmit_silence_during_record=yes in /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf (as mentioned on the wiki). I don't know about the Record application.