Hello,
Customer has a Partner ACS 308 R3.0.3 processor (slot 0) with a 308EC R3.0 (slot 1) and a 206E R3.0 (slot 2) in a 5 slot carrier.
A couple of years ago I had proved a C.O. line trouble to a defective 1st port (L1) on the 308 ACS processor card and switched it to the 2nd port (L5) of the 308EC card. Port 1 (L4) of that card already had something plugged into it, so I decided to leave it alone. I then removed L1 from all of the sets and programmed L5 in its place. So the phones were then programmed as L5, L2, & L3.
It's been fine up until the other day. The customer indicated that by power cycling the Partner system it would clear the trouble. Yesterday, while testing it, I couldn't find anything wrong. BTW, this line is also tied into the alarm panel, so I suspected that it might be intermittantly turning off the "house" side of the connection. In an effort to cause something to happen, I kept accessing the 3 active lines (L5, L2, & L3) in the system and was lucky enough to have it fail. There was a red led on L5 on the phone and no dial tone. I immediately ran upstairs and disconnected the alarm panel from the line. Back at the Partner set L5 was still the same. I then unplugged the line cord from the 308EC card's 2nd port (L5) and checked the line for dial tone. It was good. The Partner was still locked up. With that, I moved the line to the 2nd port on the 206E card (L8) and removed it (L5) from all of the sets and programmed L8 in its place. Everything seemed to work fine after that.
I should also mention that at one point prior to this I reseated all of the cards as a precaution, since I wasn't able to find anything wrong at the time.
Then today, I received a message that the line has gone into trouble again. I'm not sure what to check next since, at this point, the line has been physically connected to each of the cards in the system at one time or another. The only other common denominator would be the backplane of the 5 slot carrier. I don't want to arbitrarily change out cards only to have it fail again.
Does anyone here have any pointers on how to pinpoint this trouble?
Originally, I suggested to the customer that I swap C.O. lines 1 & 3 (L5 & L3 in the system) and that if the trouble stayed on C.O. line 1, it would indicate that the card was at fault, but that if it moved over to C.O. 3, it meant that there was a problem with the line itself. Unfortunately, the customer found that too confusing, although I don't see why. After the scenario that I described above, it didn't really matter anymore.
Any help in finding this trouble would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance to those who post a reply.
Peter.
