atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Comdial Telephones & Systems FXII No Communication Some Phones

I have customer with an FX-II. They had issues a few weeks back where some phones said no communication. Last month a reboot fixed it. This morning they have the same and more phones doing it. The reboot didn't fix the phones. I think all the phones that are out a limited to the second LDS card. Is this as simple as a bad FXLDS-16 or is software / CPU more likely?

A little gun shy since I had something similar with a DX-80 not that long ago where it looked like a card but it was the programming. Re-download database was the solution there.

Probably a LDS card. Roll the two cards and see if the problem switches slots. Particularly if the 1st card is functioning properly. I have a ton of spare cards if you need replacements.

Thanks! However, the closer I looked the more I thought it had to be a card. I ordered a new one overnight from HEB and they're all fixed up as of the end of business today.

Ugh. New card good for just less than a week. This morning stations out again. By the time I got to the site the card was back online. Decided to pull the old BBLFXII as it was ancient, when I turned everything back on again that card didn't come back. It showed the fast blink. I took out the 3 screws holding it in, plugged in the aux power to hot swap the card, but before I even could pull the card out it started working again. It seems like just the small amount of pressure touching the card made it come back online. Wondering if it's a connection issue or maybe power. This is going to be a needle in a haystack.

I'm going to swap the new card in slot 3 with a known good card in slot 1, and then put the card from slot 1 into slot 4. That should rule out a slot issue, and the outside possibility that I have two cards that have the same problem.

Perhaps the back-plane is out of tweek? I had that issue on an old TIE system years ago the fix was to loosen one of the screws on the cabinet a turn or two. 🔧

What software rev? You can always do a TTY emulator and pull the error logs. I have seen a nail through a station cable cause issues like this before. Worse comes to worse you can turn on Black Box and look at the line by line code if some has the BBX reader available.

Just to update you guys...
It really seems like I have two cards that have the same or very similar issue. When I swapped the new card from from 3 to 1 it failed within minutes. I'm thinking the number of phones as the load makes a difference in how long it takes to fail. The old known good card moved to slot 4 seemed to work just fine. However, since I knocked out the main 16 users, I had to quickly swap back. Once the new failing card was back in slot 4 it seemed odd as if it would come back online and then off again when I touched the card. Maybe it was coincidental, because I wasn't able to make it come back online every time. I'm still suspicious that there could be something up with the back plane or cabinet itself.

Even without the amphenol connected the status LED goes from fast flash to normal and then back again. So, that rules out cabling or bad phones.

I believe the software is 17C or D. I worked further with distribution, and they even contacted one of their old pros and conferenced me in. I used hyperterminal and accessed some ilogs with the special seed number back door thing. The logs didn't reveal a specific port as being a troublemaker. The FX expert guy mentioned "demon" phones and/or cabling, but that went out the window when slot 4 went offline w/o amphenol connected. He also had me verify circuits in cabinet view to check for database corruption. I guess a bad DB sometimes doesn't show all circuits on the card. The FX expert said after all we did it seems to be a card or the cabinet.

So, at this point it seems to be my original failed card & one that came from distribution that fails after some time in use. I'm not super confident, but I'll see what happens when a new card shows up this afternoon. Probably install it tomorrow.

So if the new card fails that leaves Software or Backplane...my bets are on Backplane.

Sounds very believable. However, why would the problem follow the card and not the slot?

😬

I think I've been making that face for the past few days. This is an odd one.

(Edit spelling)

Installed the second new card last week on Thursday. So far so good. The goal is to make it past seven days, since the last new card took about six days to act wacky like the last one. I decided to put the new card into slot 1 and the known good card into slot 4. Mainly because slot 1 has more extensions, and failed faster when I was testing.

So, here we go...

All stations still working fine on both cards. However, something is going on that is probably related to whatever the original problem was...

Several calls have been cut off in voicemail, and some issues getting into and/or checking VM.

The VM is on ports 15 & 16 on the LDS in slot 1. This is the 2nd new card.
Original problem card was in 3.
New card went into 3 and failed after 6 days.
Tried new card in 1 and moved 1 to 4. Card in 1 failed within minutes of booting
2nd new card installed in slot 1 - 5 or 6 days ago.

Not sure what to think now... CPU? Cabinet / backplane? Should I restore a backup before this all started some time ago?

Did I read Backplane?

If you believe that it is a Software Corruption then if you default the system and reload the database you have a great chance of uploading the corruption. The best way is to sit with two computers and hand copy, screen-by-screen the database, from the suspect database to a clean version.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

LOL you read correctly. I believe that was your opening comment here. I really have no idea what it could be.

As for the software I have backups that go back pretty far... Like several years. Starting from scratch wouldn't be that hard either. It's a simple system that should have been something like a DX-80, but I think this was installed prior to us selling that system. Dunno for sure.

I rebooted the the voicemail, ran a full scandisk (no errors), and powered it off / on. I doubt the cut off messages would be the VM at this point, but maybe it's unrelated (just thought I'd go through the motions).

I feel like this has the potential to bleed on until something major happens.

A services board will also cause random issues. I'd see if the customer is a 5 day a week organization. If so I'd load a default database on Friday after close of business and see if it runs clean over the weekend. That would eliminate the database. You can save the database as a .dbr file and email it to me. I can look at it or load it in one of my test systems to debug/stress test.

Dave

It doesn't seem like that is long enough for the oddball issues to show. Or do you mean put one of the earlier "bad" LDS cards back in?