Up to now the preferred way to obtain traces of the communication between Asterisk-Java and Asterisk was using tcpdump, wireshark or ngrep as described in Debugging Manager API. Having a full log of the direct network communication is often the only way to resolve issues related to problems in the Manager API or Fast AGI.

To make it easier for our users to obtain these traces we have now included a tracing feature directly into Asterisk-Java. You can enable it at runtime by setting the system property org.asteriskjava.trace to true. On the command line:

java -Dorg.asteriskjava.trace=true ...

Trace files are written to the temp dir by default (“java.io.temp”). You can specify an alternate location by using the org.asteriskjava.trace.directory system property:

java -Dorg.asteriskjava.trace=true \
     -Dorg.asteriskjava.trace.directory=/opt/traces ...

Log files contain a timestamp and the IP addresses and ports of the involved servers in their file name. A typical file looks like this:

2009-10-20T21:51:18.414CEST <<< Asterisk Call Manager/1.1
2009-10-20T21:51:18.536CEST >>> action: Challenge
                            >>> actionid: 888911819_0#
                            >>> authtype: MD5
                            >>>
2009-10-20T21:51:18.601CEST <<< Response: Success
2009-10-20T21:51:18.663CEST <<< ActionID: 888911819_0#
2009-10-20T21:51:18.664CEST <<< Challenge: 336054137
2009-10-20T21:51:18.665CEST <<<
2009-10-20T21:51:18.705CEST >>> action: Login
                            >>> actionid: 888911819_1#
                            >>> authtype: MD5
                            >>> username: manager
                            >>> key: ed0481d08ae7832fb
                            >>>
2009-10-20T21:51:18.768CEST <<< Response: Success
2009-10-20T21:51:18.831CEST <<< ActionID: 888911819_1#
2009-10-20T21:51:18.832CEST <<< Message: Authentication accepted
2009-10-20T21:51:18.833CEST <<<

This new feature is already part of the latest Asterisk-Java 1.0.0-CI-SNAPSHOT and will be shipped with milestone 3.

Please consider attaching a trace file to your bug reports in the future. It speeds up bug fixing considerably.