We are using free PBX 2.4 with 150 VoIP phones on the system. most of them are Aastra 933i and a few are Polycom 57 and 55. We are getting No Service ocurring throughout the day on about 5 to 10% of our phones that occur at different times and last from 10 seconds to about three minutes. The service comes back on but some phones have had this 5 to 10 times throughout the day. The problem has become worse in the last few days. We installed updates last night and rebooted all phones but the problem continues and seems to be getting more frequent today.
The system has been very stable for the last three months and we cannot pin anything to this except that we have reached about 150 phones on the system now.
Has anyone experienced this problem and found a solution?
DNS for our VoIP system is set up on our redundant VoIP server. Almost all of the 157 phones are DHCP enabeled.
We relocated the server a couple of days ago and failed to turn the server back on. I know that is pretty stupid. We quickly realized the next morning that the phones do seek to confirm their IP addresses within a 24 hour period. We did not know that. We have the lease set for two weeks on the server. This makes us wonder if we set all of our phones to static IP addresses if this may resolve the registration problem.
I came in today and found that half of our phones with no service due to registration problems again but they all had their DHCP IP address. We were able to get them rebooted remotely.
Some phones also take 4 to 8 reboots before the registration occurs. The Polycom phones give us less registration problems and the Aastra 933i phones make up 90% of the 157 phones we have on the system.
If we new the sequence in the registration process that would be very helpful. Does the reregistration also check DHCP to confirm the IP in the process. Knowing this process may help us find what may cause 80 phones to lose registration or why one phone loses registration.
Why does decreasing the sip registration time help it seams like it would be better to register with less frequency?
Any suggestions to help us resolve this issue is appreciated.
You don’t say what version of firmware you are running on the 9133i’s but they did have a bug in earlier versions of the firmware when renewing to a phone system and using dhcp. I can’t remember the details as it’s been about a year. But the thing that fixed it was updating to latest 1.4.2 firmware.
Also for the record dhcp starts the renewal process at 50% of a dhcp lease. Then if it can’t resolve a answer it will attempt it again at the remailing 50% mark (75% total) then again at 50% of that remaining (88.5%).
So first off update the firmwware and give that a shot to start.
We are running 1.4.2.3 firmware on all of the 933i Aastra phones.
Do you know if the registration flow or process is any different in the Aastra 933i phone verses any of the Polycom phones? We do not experience the registration problem in the Polycom phones like we do in the Aastra phones.
I don’t have Polycom to know that answer. Have you looked at the aastra.cfg and .cfg files to verify that they have the correct settings and are using them?
Hit a phone via the Web UI and check what it thinks the values are. BUT DO NOT make changes if at all possible in the web UI (or phone UI) as those will override anything set in any of the config or xml files.
You can also save what the phone thinks it’s read in and runnign with are via the web ui and the troubleshooting section. That will save the memory based copy local to the machine you hit it from.
for Aastra phones the only place where every single option is available and setable is via config files. Some are available via phone ui and some via web ui.
I had an issue like this in an office with network issues. Since their computers were plugged into the phones BOTH would lose internet connectivity when the issue occurred.
I resolved it by setting each phone on a static IP address and replacing their router (it was powercycling itself intermittently). This was a two-fer I can now remote in and get to the web interface on each phone (since i know it’s IP address) if needed from the asterisk server.
It is a little more work up front but I haven’t had to touch them since
Assuming the phone is registered (dhcp or static does not matter) you can always get it’s ip by doing a sip show peers at the asterisk prompt. and that way hit the ui for the phone.
Granted we use Aastra phones and ahve configs based on Mac so knowing the Mac I can look in the current dhcp table for it’s lease and get’s it’s IP that way also. Doing static is nice for small numbers but once you get into a parge number it becomes hard to handle.
I can now remote in and get to the web interface on each phone (since i know it’s IP address) if needed from the asterisk server.