atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Vodavi Telephones & Systems Vodavi XTS Inskin problem

I have a problem with a Vodavi XTS Inskin voicemail. About every two weeks it stops working (no auto attendant/ all calls go to ext 100 and voicemail can not be accessed)and the phone systems has to be reset. We replaced the voice mail board. Vodavi tech support thought the problem had to do with software 2.2. We upgraded to 2.23 which Vodavi said would fix the problem. At the time we tried to upgrade to 3.0 but it would not work so we went back to 2.23. After a week and a half the voicemail went down again and the system had to be reset. After the Software upgrade the external pc connected to the XTS via a serial port locked up when connected and unlocked when diconnected. This went away after a XTS reset. After the latest VM failure this happened again and did not unlock the PC after 2 resets.

Flash or HDD? Any installed T1 or PRI cards?

Is the PC connected to the Voice Mail?

The voicemail is HDD. The PC is connected to the top serial port on the MPB2. Also before VM fails users have noticed the lights on their phones stop working.

There are no T1 or Pri cards. There are 4 LCOB 8,3 DTIB 24 and 13 SLIB-E 12 .

I'm assuming you've swapped the voice mail and thoroughly checked the AC power and/or RF interference.

Put the VM card as far away as possible from the SLIB cards. I had an XTS heavily populated with SLIBs and I suspect they introduced some noise in the cabinet causing VM issues.

Try this in the first cabinet:
DTIB 24
DTIB 24
DTIB 24
Empty
VM
Empty
LCOB
LCOB

Put the balance of the LCOB and SLIB cards in the expansion cabinets. Make sure you have the cabinets either bolted together with the provided brackets or a ground wire looped through them.

This is not a 2.23 issue. Somebody at support is leading you wrong.

If you have a PC always hooked up to the XTS and you are using a USB to serial adapter then loop a ground wire to the PC. This isn't an issue if the PC has a built in serial port. If it still locks up then swap the power supply between the main cabinet and one of the expansions.

If the above doesn't work swap the main cabinet with one of the expansions.

Do you have a USB keyboard and or mouse connected to the voice mail?

The symptoms indicate an initialization problem.

If the voice mail system wasn't properly initialized during installation this is the sort of problems that can occur.
But if you do have to initialize it now you will loose all personal greetings along with everything else.

The PC has a serial port. No mouse or keyboard is connected to the keyboard. The VM was swapped back in January. I downloaded the data swapped the board and uploaded the data to the new board.
This is the config

first cabinet:
DTIB 24
DTIB 24
DTIB 24
LCOB
LCOB
LCOB
LCOB
VM
second cabinet:
SLIB
SLIB
SLIB
SLIB
SLIB
SLIB
SLIB
SLIB

third cabinet:

SLIB
SLIB
SLIB
SLIB
SLIB

You may be overloading the power in the first cabinet. The configurator which calculates power lays out the boards this way

CAB 0
DTIB 24
DTIB 24
SLI12
SLI12
LCOB (WITH CID)
LCOB (WITH CID)
SLI12
SLI12

CAB 1
VM
DTIB24
SLI12
SLI12
SLI12
SLI12
SLI12
LCOB (WITH CID)
LCOB (WITH CID)

CAB 2
SLI12
SLI12
SLI12
SLI12

TCE, move one LCOB to cabinet #2 and two SLIB cards to #3. Move the VM card to the slot right after the DTIB24 cards and leave an empty slot between the VM and the remaining LCOB cards. This will maintain station and CO numbering and get the VM card away from cards that "might" cause interference.

It's worth a try.

Derrick, if I have a 2nd cabinet I never run SLIB cards in the first if I have an inskin, especially the flash VM. I have had issues running the VM in any cabinet other than the 1st cabinet regardless of what the configurator says.

I have only one 2 cab system with an HD inskin. It is also in the first cabinet along with a PRI card and two 24 port Lan cards. The LCOBS are in cabinet 2. According to a techie friend of mine at Vodavi...its the CID modules or a pri card that can cause so much trouble with the high speed bus that they share with the VM with no empty slot between them. Basically the voicemail can do a spontaneous reboot (in the middle of the night an xp thing that can be disabled) which can cause the system to forget the card is there along with the LCOB and or PRI cards. I know this to be true because it happened to one of my customers. However 2.23 was supposed to fix this problem and they had 2.10 The system in question here has 2.23 so I still believe it is a power problem. If the cards can be arranged to maintain station numbering and fix this that is all the better.

I am still not clear about the PC connected to the system. Are you running call accounting? Is it there for Admin? There was a problem with the Dispatch VM that if a PC was left connected to the serial port and the PC was shut down or if it locked up...it would take down the Dispatch. I wonder if something close to that is going on here...just a thought.

I swapped the MPB2 on Friday. The new MPB2 had 3.0 on it and took the uploaded compiled database. We connected the PC and it did not lock up. The PC is used for call accounting and is running Trivium.

Thank you for the update. I wonder if the old MPB2 has a fault? I wasn't aware of any issues with 2.23 and the inskin VM but I learn something new every day.

We speculate that the old MPB2 has a fault. We will have to wait at least 2 weeks to know if it solved the VM problem.

After weeks without a problem, the voicemail failed today. When users tried to access voicemail they got ringing with no answer intermitantly. System needed to be rebooted. Any ideas?

I had this identical problem with a hdd on an STSe and it turned out that I had to send it off to have the drivers reinstalled. I ran a daily log and at the times it would stop working it was having device port issues on all channels. I sent the report to Vodavi and they said the drivers needed to be reinstalled. I sent it to Aztec and it has been running flawlessly now for 3 months. I know it is an XTS hdd, but it could be the same thing. Run a daily log report and see if it looks like what I said. They had me turn off daily maintenance, upgrade the software, and everything else before I sent them the report. That is what finally fixed the problem.

Bada Bump

Any new information, or have you sent this in for repair?

When the system stops answering, have you plugged in a monitor to see if there are any errors on the screen? These are Windows machines and are effected by Windows errors. The VM software is not perfect either and can give errors as well.

Adteldon - Why did Vertical support not have you reload them yourself?

Problem happened twice in July and Vodavi said it must be a corruption in the XTS database. On Friday re-intialized the programming in the XTS and rebuilt it. The VM went down again today.

Is there an active network (ethernet) connection to the Pathfinder?

What is the software version of the Pathfinder?

When the Pathfinder goes down, have you noticed if it is possible to access some of the ports on the voice-mail by dialing their extension number? In other words, does every port go down, or just the first port?

There is no ethernet connection on the pathfinder.

When the system goes down the monitor says:

Preloading Action
Waiting for Call

over and over

I haven't been there to check each extension but with the autoattendant out multiple calls ring in on 100.

On 8/14, 8/15, 8/17, 8/18 the Voicemail went down. On 8/18 I did two things and the voicemail hasn't gone done since. 3 weeks. The XTS seemed to have a good ground on an electrical box but on the 18th I bridged it to a ground bus on the other side of the phone room that I don't know where it was grounded. It read 7 mV between them. I also bridged the grounds to a cold water pipe about 20 feet away.
The second thing I did was disconnected the PC in the phone room from the MPB2. The Pc was connected with serial cables and was running Trivium call acounting. 2 serial cables were connected to the MPB2. The serial cable to the inskin from the PC was left connected.

Any ideas? Since the ground didn't seem bad before I am leaning toward the PC. I need to reconnect the call accounting soon.