sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Comdial Telephones & Systems Comdial flash VM shuts down occasionally...

Hi all,

I just got started in the wonderful world of Comdial phone systems... bought and set up our first in-house demo system about a month or two ago. I thought I had finally solved all the initial problems, but....

Now the voicemail program is sporadically shutting down for no apparent reason. It's been happening for about a week now, usually at least once a day. When I connect to the card using Keylink, I get a dos prompt. I can restart the system by launching the bmail program. I've actually seen it shut down while I was connected to it over Keylink, and it's not really "crashing" per se, but just politely shutting down. It waits for all calls to terminate, goes through the normal shutdown routine, and then i get back to the black dos screen.

I've talked to Comdial about it. Every solution they have involves losing everyone's greetings and all of the auto-attendant greetings. I don't think the IT department could withstand the negative publicity of telling everyone to rerecord their names and greetings again. I kind of wish that Comdial would take a little more time to go through my settings with me to make sure it's not something I've done.

In any case, I came to work this morning and again the voicemail was down. This time, I cold-started the DX-120, reloaded the config file, and everything has been up and running for about an hour.

The wierd thing is that the voicemail was working fine for over a month, and I haven't even thought about the phone system - no less make any changes to it - that would have triggered these problems. The only thing I did last week (before these problems started) was to record the auto-attendant greetings, and set up the auto-attendant boxes. The auto-attendant worked fine for a few days, and then VM started to shut down.

Any ideas? :bang:

Thanks in advance,
Scott

Try the "search" feature here in the Comdial section using "voice mail shut down" as the search words. This topic has been discussed quite a bit---see if anything makes sense to you. Where did you purchase the system from?? You may have to get ready to get an advance replacement for it--but check out the threads that discuss this problem.

I took a look around the site. It looks like many people have had similar problems, but there isn't a clear solution. Quite frustrating.

The other thing I failed to mention is that during the installation of the VM card, I had unrelated problems, and while talking to a tech at comdial, he instructed me to remove the jumper on the VM card labelled "SCRN REDIR". That jumper is still removed, although I have no idea what it does, as there is no documentation. There is also a factory-installed jumper on "CF MASTER".

While I doubt that will have any impact on my problem, I was just zoning out looking at the circuit boards this morning and thought I'd mention it.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions anyone might have...

-Scott

Is this happening at 3:00pm?? If it is, then it's just the VM doing its "HouseKeeping chores". Change the time for this to 3:00AM.

I had a tech that swore that our VM was shutting off "all the time" and then rebooting. We found that it was doing it at 3:00PM only.

We tapped the tech on the head with a punch-down tool, changed the time to AM, and it's been fine ever since. Did Comdial Tech support say anything about this??

Default for defrag is once a week on Sunday at 3am I believe, if this is a new board it should be at the default setting. Possible though. I had a board failing this way and ended up with a warranty replacement, also after about 2 months of perfect performance. The Phone System programming is not causing it. On the one I had, eventually it would not boot at all. I would reset it and it would shut right down. If your going to sell this stuff (of any make or model) you should have back up systems and boards in stock. Put a new board in and when it works fine for a week, call for an RMA.
Mark

The default is actually Wednesday. I agree that it's a good possibility that the time is 12 hours off, and the voicemail could be doing its thing at 3PM instead of 3AM. If it's happening daily at 3PM or 3AM, I would see if anyone edited the diskm.bat file, to make it run every day, instead of just Wednesday. Double check your clock from the banner screen in Voicemail, or go out to DOS and type the word TIME (then hit Enter).

I agree with the RMA suggestion, if you have another one you can throw in.

If you know your way around voicemail, you shouldn't be worried about losing greetings and other recordings (messages can also be backed up, but it's less troublesome if you don't backup the messages. Pretty much anything on voicemail can be backed up.

Run a scan for corruption. I doubt that's going to be the cause, but it can't hurt.

On your banner screen, look to see how many minutes of recording time you have left. If you're down to nothing, that would definitely be causing you problems!

Go in and turn of logging (I think in the General screen). It's turned on (Log to File, I think it's called) by default. This can eat up space on the CF.

Thanks for the advice.

The time is set correctly for backing up, and on the voicemail unit itself. It's not that it's shutting down every day at the same time, or once a week at the same time, etc. There was a few times when I would start it up from DOS, and be watching it out of the corner of my eye while doing something else, and it would shut down after a few minutes. However, as of right now, it's been up and running for about 24 hours with no problems.

I guess I'll see if cold starting everything made any difference. If not, I'll root around in DOS a little more, try to do a backup, and get an RMA. *sigh*

Somehow I'm getting the feeling this isn't a product I can stand behind...

Thanks again for all the help.

Sorry you're have a bad time with the voice mail. There are alot of us here who sell and service Comdial/Vertical and make a good living at it. I'd get an RMA as it sounds like you got a lemon.

I had one like that out of more then 30 I've installed. Comical replaced it without question, seemed like they knew there was a bad batch out there. I wish I knew where to find the serial number of the bad board, but it would probably take me all day.
Mark