Asterisk UK Caller ID

I’m sure I’ve got an older post giving details of a patch to get caller ID working. I’d used the same patch for about 5 years over the different versions of Asterisk and it always worked, until recently.

A fresh install on one of the servers, applied the patch and made a bunch of test calls, half caught the Caller ID half missed it. So I worked on it for a while, and could not get it to reliably detect the Caller ID. I posted onto the forums incase anyone else had used the patch nothing.
What made it worse was this server was 1 of 3 running asterisk with a Digum Card on a UK phoneline. the other 2 were still working. So in an effort to eliminate possible causes I ended up installing the same version of asterisk and dahdi that was on each of the other 2 servers in turn and running tests, both with the patch and without. Sometimes it looked better than others catching 8 out of 10 CLI’s but that wasn’t the 10/10 that I was getting on this server before a fresh install of the OS.

After a while I gave up, it wasn’t an important server. I’d only put the asterisk card in to track calls coming into the home line, but it didn’t do anything more than log the Date and CLI. Everything else was done over SIP on this server, so I left it kind of working.
Over time the logs seemed to fill with unknown CLI’s more often.

Anyway onto this month. Earlier in the month I reboot my server remotely, when it didn’t come back online I went to investigate why. It was at this point I was almost in tears. I’d stupidly left an SD card in the server that I was imaging, and the server had boot from it. What made this a really really bad move was the fact the SD card I’d imaged with the Rasberry OS, and it decided to go off and format sda (I presume hard coded) which unfortunately was my HDD NOT the SD Card. To make things worse my OS on this server was encrypted, so little chance of recovering anything at all.
As the server runs alot of different stuff, I had to rebuild it as quickly as I possibly could.
A few days ago I got onto the asterisk installation, so ran through installing Dahdi and Asterisk, and changed the configuration based on memory and copying from the other 2 servers. Then I hit the Caller ID problem, out of 8 test calls 3 CLI’s. Now I know this one was working 100% so it has to be something obvious.
Then I remembered seeing something on the “working” server as I was checking it’s configuration to copy and paste.

nano -w /etc/modprobe.d/dahdi.conf
# You should place any module parameters for your DAHDI modules here
# Example:
#
# options wctdm24xxp latency=6
options wctdm opermode=UK fwringdetect=1 battthresh=4

Not something I would have paid attention to, I only ever remember editing a dahdi.blacklist.conf to stop the card being detected as a NetJet. Anyway I added the above file and contents, then reboot. (It should be noted at this point that I hadn’t applied the patch and was almost about to).
After the reboot I started asterisk and run through test calls. 9 out of 9 calls all CLI detected.

So the following day I went and checked the server I was originally having problems with after a fresh install. That didn’t have the line

options wctdm opermode=UK fwringdetect=1 battthresh=4

Bit it did have the blacklist setup. So I added the above and reboot. 10 test calls later all CLI’s detected.

I’ve no idea where I got the above from, but I must have stumbled upon it as a replacement fixed instead fo the patch I’d been using. I say that because the patch files wasn’t on the server that had this configuration, and I always leave the patch files in root incase I need them again.

So if your having a problem with UK Caller ID it maybe worth adding the above.
For info I’m running:-
Server 3:
dahdi-linux-complete-2.6.0+2.6.0
Asterisk 1.8.6.0

Server 2:
dahdi-linux-complete-2.6.1+2.6.1
Asterisk 1.8.6.0

Server 1:
dahdi-linux-complete-2.6.2+2.6.2
asterisk-11.2.1

Server 1 being the newest install, and Server 2 being the one I left with the problem for months.

Hope this helps someone. As UK Caller ID on Asterisk used to be a huge pain with little support and not something that people seemed to cover because Businesses tend to go SIP, IAX or ISDN eliminating the need to fix missing CLI’s.