Activating and Deactivating a VICIdial Carrier

The Active flag is the simplest field on a VICIdial carrier and one of the most common reasons a brand-new trunk does nothing. You can fill in the registration string, the account entry, the dialplan, and the protocol perfectly, click submit, and still place zero calls, because the record is set to N. This post covers what Active does, why a fresh carrier defaults to not working, and how to disable a trunk the right way.

In one sentence: Active decides whether the carrier is included in the auto-generated Asterisk conf. Set to N, the entry is skipped and the trunk will not work, no matter how correct everything else is.

Turning a new carrier on

After you create a carrier record, you have to set Active=Y on that page before the trunk is enabled for the server. Save it, wait about a minute for the conf to regenerate, and the carrier becomes active. Then confirm the peer from the Asterisk CLI with sip show peers or iax2 show peers depending on your IAX2 or SIP protocol choice.

This is a deliberate safety step. You can stage a Carrier record, fill in every field, and leave it inactive until you are ready, so a half-finished trunk never starts taking or placing live calls before you mean it to.

How the flag changes the conf

stateDiagram-v2
  [*] --> Inactive
  Inactive --> Active: set Y, conf regenerates
  Active --> Inactive: set N, conf regenerates
  Active --> PeerUp: registration succeeds
  PeerUp --> Inactive: set N
  Inactive --> [*]: record deleted

The flag flips inclusion in the generated Conf file. Y means the entry is written and the peer can come up; N means it is left out entirely. Flipping the flag triggers a conf regeneration, which is why there is a short wait before the change takes effect. Nothing happens instantly; give it that minute.

Disabling instead of deleting

When you want to stop using a trunk, you have two choices: delete the record or set Active=N. Setting it to N is almost always the better move. It pulls the Trunk out of the conf immediately on the next regeneration, but keeps the full configuration on hand. If you switch providers and need to switch back, or you are testing a replacement, the old record is one toggle away from working again.

This is the clean way to cut over between carriers. Bring the new trunk up with Active=Y, confirm calls flow, then set the old one to N. Your Dialplan routing decides which trunk a call uses, and the Active flag decides which trunks even exist in the conf. The two work together during a cutover.

For how Active fits with the rest of the carrier fields, start with our carrier integration guide. When you are ready to swap providers, our post on switching carriers walks through a clean cutover.

Wrap-up

Active=Y to use a carrier, Active=N to disable it without losing the config, and always allow about a minute for the conf to regenerate. It is the easiest field to forget and the easiest to fix. On VICIfast your dialer is ready in under 40 seconds, so you can stage and toggle carriers on a real box right away. See our pricing to spin one up.