sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Comdial Telephones & Systems DX-120 Corrupted Programming

Customer called me at 7:30 AM saying their phone system was down. The red heartbeat LED by the power switch was blinking, but the phones were dark. They had already tried rebooting the system several times.

I drove out and rebooted myself. The LED started flashing as well as the VM did its boot up beeps, so that told me the power supply was probably all right. After several more tries, the phones finally came back up.

When I pressed line one, the display showed "Hotel Mode enabled", in fact all the outside line buttons showed that. A quick F#3 to check the buttons showed they were indeed set for 817, 818, 819, etc. I checked the programming and hotel mode had been enabled. Obviously the DB was corrupted.

Rather than wading through the system to figure out what happened, I reloaded the last back up and everything tested all right...or so I thought.

I dropped by the next day and they said the system was dialing the wrong numbers. When I tried it myself, what I found was the system was indeed dialing the right number, but the display popped up with an entirely different number.

While testing, I dialed a long distance time & temp number, but the display showed that I dialed a local number.

So THIS time I defaulted the systems first, then reloaded the backup and that fixed it.

This is a common TECOM issue. Make sure the AC power isn't on a circuit with a motor load and you have a battery backup installed.

Actually the DX-120 seems to have fewer issues with this than most TECOM systems.

--Bill.

Battery back up is there, plugged directly into the A/C line without a surge arrester (as suggested by Vertical to solve the VM crashing several times a week every few months).

If the voice mail is crashing every couple of weeks then you have a different issue. If you've replaced the VM and it's still happening then replace the KSU.

I'm convinced some cabinets have either bus timing or noisy bus issues which manifest itself as VM crashes, data corruption and certain stations acting erratically.

The vast majority of my DX-80/120 installations with voice mail run for years with no issues. The ones that are problematic I just replace the cabinet. Considering the cost of a cabinet in the package pricing I just call it a small cost of doing business. Usually I either pitch the problem cabinets or use them on very small non voice mail installations.

The ONLY thing I haven't swapped out was the flash card. Otherwise, I agree, I have several others out there that only have to be reset once a year perhaps.

I'll call into the system and record everyone's greetings and messages on a CD and replace the card, then record the greetings and message back in.