sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Avaya - Lucent Telephones & Systems Urgent problem with VOIP phones at remote office

We have a remote office that have VOIP phones managed from the switch at our office, the parent company. I got a call from the receptionist there and she said that the phones don't work at all. The only thing on the display is the extension. When they pick up the handset, she said the phone is completely dead, like it's turned off. When I call the internal extension, it says line 5 cover and it automatically forwards to VM. I haven't paid much attention when calling that office because I rarely do, but I don't remember seeing line 5 before.

What system and software version?

I'm sorry. I need to put that in my signature so I can't forget it in my post.

It's an S8700 Media Server and I'm looking to see how to find out software version now.

Software version is R012x.01.1.414.1

I just talked to the receptionist at the remote office again and she told me that the phones worked for about an hour and a half, and then stopped about an hour ago. I did open a ticket earlier with the local provider in case it was the line. I'm not sure that's related. I haven't done anything except for poke around the switch and restart the Cisco router for the VOIP traffic, but that was about 45 minutes ago.

The phones have been going up and down. Every time they go down, I call the provider, they say that they will test. Within an hour, the phones work again for a few hours, and then go down again. This pattern has happens 3 times now since yesterday. This last time, I got a direct number to the local test site, and he said "There is nothing wrong with the circuit. I can test clean all the way to your CSU" He is telling me that it is my equipment and that there is nothing he can do for me. I'm kind of stumped with angering clients.

Is this remote site an LSP or ESS off of the S8700?

I don't know the answer to your question off hand. I am going to find out now and will report back.

I just got back from the sister agency. The biggest problem that I have with the management of the phone switch is the complete lack of documentation of how any of it was set up. In the closet, was an Avaya chassis. There aren't model numbers on anything, so I don't know exactly what I'm looking at. I took some pictures so I'm going to find out now. The CSU has a patch cable from the DMARC, and then goes to the Cisco router. On the Avaya unit, top left hand side, there were 4 lights, Alarm, PWR, CPU, and I don't remember the 4th. The alarm light was red. I couldn't get on the wireless network so I came back to the office, where the main switch is anyway. On my way back, they called me and said that the phones were working again. I asked someone to go into the closet, and the alarm light wasn't on anymore.

What a fiasco!!!

I think we have a bunch of little problems that are assisting in the creation of this one bigger problem. First of all, I called Avaya support and opened a ticket. The initial tech told me that it looked like the gateway at the remote site was unregistered. She was not able to connect to it from my S8700. She dispatched a tech. The tech was there before I got there, and was working for a while with an Avaya engineer. The first thing that he told me was that while he was connected to the console on the G700, the power went out to 2 servers and the phone switch. There are also 3 routers and 1 switch in the same rack, but he didn't notice if those powered off as well. He noticed the lights on the UPS blinking a few times like it was restarting, and then showed an error light next to the dead battery. I was not at all ready for that info, mainly because their server, Internet router, and data switches are all in the same rack, plugged into the same UPS. They have never once complained about network problems of any kind. While I was digesting all of that, he continued to tell me that the G700 was not configured properly, and has never received translations from my S8700. He went on to say that the routing tables were completely empty. He could ping the S8700 from the remote site, but could not go the other way. I'm so confused how the phones ever worked at all if that was the case. He said that eventually, the G700 figured out where it needed to go and what it needed to do, but that it took a lot of time for that process to happen. The first thing that I did was to unplug everything Avaya from the UPS and plugged it into the wall for now, until I can replace the battery in the UPS. I didn't understand all of what the tech said, but from his explanation, the engineer made some changes to the routing tables to make sure the gateway knew where my S8700 was. I took this to be a temporary band-aide for the lack of translation updates from the S8700. He assured me that the phone system would remain stable because he was sure the core of the problem was the faulty UPS, coupled with the misconfiguration of the LSP. Well, as I'm sure you can guess, I got the call from the office about an hour ago that their phones were down again. The phone switch isn't even on the UPS anymore, and I know for a fact that the power did not go down to any of the other equipment in that rack. I called Avaya again and she told me that both the tech and engineer were out for the day, and that she would call me first thing in the morning once she gets in touch with either. She asked me in the meantime to try and get the translations pushed from the S8700. That is where I'm going to focus my energy tonight. I hope I can find some good docs on Avaya's support site. Any and all suggestions welcome!!!!

One command that the Avaya tech probably did was "display media-gateway X", the "X" being the media gateway number. If there is a "y" in the "authenticated" field, then the S8700 can send translations to the G700 providing that the routing to it is correct.