# Asterisk Project : Making a Phone Call

Added by malcolmd , edited by lmadsen on Apr 28, 2011

At this point, you should be able to pick up Alice's phone and dial extension 6002 to call Bob, and dial 6001 from Bob's phone to call Alice. As you make a few test calls, be sure to watch the Asterisk command-line interface (and ensure that your verbosity is set to a value three or higher) so that you can see the messages coming from Asterisk, which should be similar to the ones below:

    server*CLI>     -- Executing [6002@users:1] Dial("SIP/demo-alice-00000000", "SIP/demo-bob,20") in new stack
        -- Called demo-bob
        -- SIP/demo-bob-00000001 is ringing
        -- SIP/demo-bob-00000001 answered SIP/demo-alice-00000000
        -- Native bridging SIP/demo-alice-00000000 and SIP/demo-bob-00000001
      == Spawn extension (users, 6002, 1) exited non-zero on 'SIP/demo-alice-00000000'

As you can see, Alice called extension 6002 in the [users] context, which in turn used the Dial application to call Bob's phone. Bob's phone rang, and then answered the call. Asterisk then bridged the two calls (one call from Alice to Asterisk, and the other from Asterisk to Bob), until Alice hung up the phone.

At this point, you have a very basic PBX. It has two extensions which can dial each other, but that's all. Before we move on, however, let's review a few basic troubleshooting steps that will help you be more successful as you learn about Asterisk.

##### Basic PBX Troubleshooting

The most important troubleshooting step is to set your verbosity level to three (or higher), and watch the command-line interface for errors or warnings as calls are placed.

To ensure that your SIP phones are registered, type sip show peers at the Asterisk CLI.

To see which context your SIP phones will send calls to, type sip show users.

To ensure that you've created the extensions correctly in the [users] context in the dialplan, type dialplan show users.

To see which extension will be executed when you dial extension 6002, type dialplan show 6002@users.