I've been using the Asterisk PBX software for around 15 years at this point. It's a product that is used in my infrastructure, but not one that I have to touch/change very often. It usually just keeps chugging along doing its job and doing it well.

Recently I was tasked with changing a feature we were using from the application MeetMe to the newer ConfBridge. I use the AMI pretty extensively in this code base, and love being able to control things via code rather than trying to crowbar something into the dialplan.

I set out to work and got the feature itself working very easily. The feature basically added 3 channels into the bridge. Then it came time to have to kick one of the channels out. This is where it got tricky. Every time I tried to run the ConfBridgeList action, I was getting a permission denied error. I tried looking at the documentation in the source, online, googling the error, all to no avail. So for testing, I simply set the permissions on the AMI user to "all" and what do you know it worked.

Leaving the permissions to all was not an option for me. I pride myself on trying to keep the permissions as low as possible. There's no need to open up any potential issues. So now I need to find out which permission I need. One by one, I add a permission the user doesn't have, reload the manager extension, and try again.

Low and behold, it turned out to be the "reporting" permission. WHAT?!?!?! I have no clue how this comes down to a reporting permission issue, but hopefully this post will help someone else that is having this same issue.

Even with this little issue, I want to say a HUGE THANK YOU Asterisk and the Asterisk community for a wonderful product.