How to confirm a phone is registered with sip show peers

The fastest way to know whether a VICIdial phone is really online is to ask the server directly. On the box that runs Asterisk, a single command lists every phone and tells you which ones are registered. No guessing from the agent screen, no waiting for a test call. You go straight to the source.

Run the command on the Asterisk box

Connect to the server over SSH and open the Asterisk command line by running asterisk -rvvv. At the prompt, type sip show peers and press enter. This is an Asterisk CLI command, so it runs on the server, not on the agent's computer. It prints a table of every SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) peer the server knows about, one row per phone.

Read the output

Each row is one phone, listed by its extension. The columns that matter most are the host and the status. A registered phone shows its IP address under host instead of the word Unspecified, which means the device has checked in and Asterisk knows where to reach it.

• Host shows an IP address: the phone has registered and the server can reach it.
• Host shows Unspecified: the phone has not registered, so it is offline as far as VICIdial is concerned.
• Status shows OK with a millisecond number: that number is the latency, the round-trip time to the phone. A low value is healthy.
• Status shows UNREACHABLE: the phone registered at some point but the server can no longer reach it, often a network or firewall change.

flowchart LR
  A[Run sip show peers] --> B{Host column}
  B -->|Shows an IP| C{Status column}
  B -->|Unspecified| D[Phone not registered]
  C -->|OK with low ms| E[Registered and healthy]
  C -->|UNREACHABLE| F[Network or firewall issue]

What to do with the result

If your phone is missing from the list or shows Unspecified, it never registered. Go back and check the Registration Password, the Server IP, and the protocol on the Phone record, since a mismatch in any one of those keeps the device off the list. If the phone is present but UNREACHABLE, the registration worked once but something on the network path changed, so check the firewall and the RTP and SIP ports. If you need the full repair sequence, the phone-not-registering fix walks through it in order.

A few quick tips

Remember that SIP and IAX phones have their Asterisk accounts created automatically within about a minute of saving the Phone record, so a brand-new phone may not appear right away. Give it that minute before deciding registration failed. It also helps to run the command twice, a few seconds apart, so you can watch a phone change from Unspecified to a real IP as it checks in. If you use the newer protocol, the equivalent command is pjsip show endpoints, which prints the same kind of online or offline state for PJSIP devices, and pjsip show contacts is handy for spotting exactly which address a phone registered from. To make sure you have the right fields filled in before you test, the required fields guide lists what every phone record needs.

Checking registration from the server is the surest way to tell a real problem from a false alarm, and the VICIdial phones guide connects this to the rest of phone setup. On a managed box, Asterisk and the firewall are already configured, so peers come up clean. See VICIfast pricing to launch a VICIdial server in under 40 seconds.