Out of curiosity, if y’all have three FreePBX’es are they all at the same site location? And if so, how many extensions? I have four of my company’s sites all connecting to a single FreePBX. Maybe 150 extensions.
1 pbx at a different location. We can call that pbx1. the ‘main’ pbx, which my original post was about is called PBX along with another called PBX2 is sitting at another location. PBX1 and 2, ‘should’ theoretically point to the main PBX. Trunks were all set up to point to PBX from the other two. We have the T1 lines going into PBX1 and 2, and outbound routing going from PBX, and hands off to PBX1 and 2. e.g. external calls go through PBX2, and 800 numbers go through PBX1.
We have around 150 extensions as well coming from 9 different locations
Let’s back things up to simplify things.
If if “the phone” has correct values, can it make/take calls to the outside world? If so, then go to any problem endpoints that cannot make/take calls and look at their settings — network settings, SIP settings, etc. And the fax endpoint sounds like a problem child. Look at its network settings, SIP settings, etc.
Yes, at the moment, all phones are working fine. It’s just the fax that’s offline. Fax lines are coming in at PBX1. From the earlier post where there were suggestions about DNS, what had thrown me off was, the newest PBX had DNS settings sitting in the resolv.conf file, whereas PBX1 and PBX2 had the dns both in the resolv.conf as well as the ifcfg-eth0 files, which i had overlooked. Once i matched up the DNS properly, the calls were going through, but then, faxes broke. We have a DHADI-DIGIUM (i totally butchered this) module installed on PBX1 that gets the fax traffic. When i dial to our fax number, it gets the fax tone, but when i actually attempt to send a fax through (PDF), it errors out giving a communication error on the sending device. As mentioned earlier, we inherited these servers from the previous employee who’s long gone, so we have no idea how the faxes were set up and where to look for any config files. When i was checking around yesterday, i noticed that the fax folder located at /var/spool/asterisk was filled with tons of PDF and such, but after all them dns changes and reboot, the folder itself disappeared from PBX1. But at least i still got the fax tone amirite? lol kidding aside, I’m wondering if the config file could’ve been in that folder which was deleted.
As @sorvani indicated, leveraging DHCP for any true clients (i.e. - not a server and not networking equipment) is the way to go. But even if you have configured a DHCP server that’s active and leasing okay, that doesn’t mean all the clients themselves are configured for DHCP. And might have static values defined instead. Case in point likely being the fax endpoint.
All devices for sure are on DHCP. We had to go through this because of a gateway change about 2 years ago, and had to take them all off of static to get the correct info from a new DHCP server at the time. This time, we just turned off DHCP from the old DC, and just moved it to Meraki. Some phones were not rebooted but i guess that might be besides the point since they’re working after the DNS changes. I guess this problem really evolved to the faxes not working instead of bringing down a DC SMH ugh.
We do not have any fax machines if that’s what you mean by ‘fax endpoint’. All incoming faxes come in as a soft copy in email format. I assume PBX1 does something with it, and hands it off to SMTP to actually send the email. All faxes point to an email address for receiving.
Thank you for the help