Asterisk Tips/Fixes/Features by John Johnson These are various Asterisk how-to items I have found/developed over the last few years. Feel free to use or share them, I look forward to adding more as I am able to compile them into a share-able format from my own notes.    “Experience is what you don’t get until just after you needed it.” Home Calls drop while on hold - fix Various versions/distributions of Asterisk will have a problem wherein SIP phones will drop calls that have been placed on hold consistently at an interval. I have seen some drop at 45 seconds on hold and some at 5 minutes. I have seen it with different brands/models of phones and also some soft phones and (this is the worst aspect of the problem*) I have seen two servers that appeared to be reasonably identical; one had the problem while the other didn’t. I have never found the source of the problem, just the fix… and having found the fix I must admit I didn’t spend much more time searching for the source. I just test for the “call drop on hold” problem in the lab before installing an Asterisk server and apply the fix as necessary. The solution is a simple addition to a .conf file as follows: By John Johnson 3/26/2013 In /etc/asterisk/sip_general_custom.conf add the following at the bottom of the file with at least one blank line separating it from the preceding lines (if any): session-timers=refuse session-expires=600 rtptimeout=0 rtpholdtimeout=300 Save the changes you have made to /etc/asterisk/sip_general_custom.conf   and reload the Asterisk configuration (you can do that from the Asterisk CLI with a simple “reload” command and not even drop a call). The fix is now in place! *I have a serious hatred of intermittent or inconsistent problems. If it’s broken, it should be broken ALL THE TIME not just “sometimes”. Home