New FreePBX system randomly stops answering — Asterisk & DAHDi need to be restarted?

Hi, about a month ago you guys helped me through an epic pilgrimage that led from trying to restore an ancient FreePBX 4 system that had crashed to building a brand new FreePBX 15 system from scratch. I sincerely appreciate all the help I got from this community and after a lot of work and advice from you guys, we’ve had a (reasonably) smooth working system for the past few weeks. However, we’ve had a couple issues which I can’t quite work out.

The main one that happens is, every once in a while the IVR just won’t pick up for incoming calls. For the caller, it just rings indefinitely and never answers or goes anywhere; at the shop it obviously never rings the phones and we have no idea someone has called. I’ve had my wife text me saying “hey your phones are not picking up” and that’s how I find out there’s a problem (after who-knows-how-many missed calls from customers).

I’ve found that if I go in to Connectivity > DAHDi Config and click the Restart DAHDi & Asterisk button, that will fix the problem.

It will stay working for a while, usually several days or longer so we think it’s fine. And then one day, randomly, someone says hey your phones aren’t working and I have to restart DAHDi & Asterisk again to make it work. Any idea what would cause this? Or of course how to prevent it? Or is there any kind of module or script that can schedule automatically restarting DAHDi & Asterisk on its own, say once every 3 days to keep it running smoothly (if that’s even possible or necessary)?

Thank you!

I think what’s most important is to figure out why the system stops responding to incoming calls. What kind of incoming lines are you using? (PRI, analog, etc)

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Please describe your involvement with DAHDI in your deployment.

I think we need a lot more information to help you here, but my initial guess without any more information would be that your firewall or NAT router may be closing the port. When you restart Asterisk, you force the system to register again which opens the port back up.

If you are using a Chan_SIP trunk, do you have qualify=yes in the PEER details? If you are using pjsip, do you have the comparable feature enabled?

In general you will find that the DAHDI channel driver will rarely be using internet ports unless over frame relay (x.25 , incredibly rare) , and specifically never SIP :wink:

He never said that he was using a DAHDI channel driver. He only said that he used a restart option contained in that module that restarts both DAHDI and Asterisk.

Actually intrinsically he did. the lack of chan_dahdi running will have absolutely no effect to any asterisk not using it (or a legacy conferencing requirement) it would never stop other channel drivers answering.

He never said that DAHDI wasn’t running.

What he said was that he used the DAHDI module to click a button that restarted BOTH DAHDI and Asterisk. Restarting Asterisk could have solved his problem. It could have nothing to do with DAHDI. He never even said he used DAHDI.

Let’s wait for the OP to do his own thinking.

Hi guys, we do use DAHDi, but you are right, I do not know whether any failure/crash was DAHDi or Asterisk. Only that the “Restart DAHDi And Asterisk” function is what fixes it. Here is our DAHDi Config:

We have a landline account… 3 phone lines with 3 physical RJ11 POTS phone wires coming into a 4-port FXO PCI card. In FreePBX the PCI card is listed under DAHDI Configuration > Analog Hardware where it shows the FXO Ports. Clicking “Edit” to view the FXO settings:

We have one DAHDi Trunk… Group 0 Ascending… identifier g0.

We also have our three phone lines listed under DAHDI Channel DIDs… each number listed as its own DAHDI DID… though truthfully I’m not 1,000% sure this was ever set up completely properly? It’s been functioning fine so I assumed so, but this section always kind of confused me.

Anyway, I think that covers our DAHDi setup. :slightly_smiling_face: I should note that it HAS been up and running with no crashes or required boots for almost 2 weeks now… a nice couple weeks of reliability. We also have no warnings (all green checkmarks) in our dashboard. But before that it had gone down every few days so I just want to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Only three lines connected to a four port card of which all four ports are defined?

How are your trunks exactly defined, does the problem start under heavy use?.

No that doesn’t completely cover your setup, the files in /etc/dahdi/ and to a lesser extent in /etc/asterisk/dahdi do

Correct, that appears to be the case. I didn’t “set” anything under DAHDi Config… Ports 1,2,3,4 were autodetected once we turned on the system with the FXO card plugged into the PCI slot and installed FreePBX. But yes, we have three lines connected. We do not have a 4th line, and I don’t see any place to delete port 4. Those fields are pre-filled.

We haven’t noticed exactly when it the problem happens, whether it’s under heavy use or at random. Unfortunately we’ve had no indication that the system is even down until someone texts us to let us know they can’t get an IVR answer on our office phones. :confused:

I set the trunk up to mimic our old FreePBX 4 system… literally opened screens from the old setup and made sure the new one was set the same:

… which is used by one outgoing route:

I apologize, I do am not familiar enough to know how to view or export those. I have PuTTY and can access my server via SSH and work my way around, IF I know the commands to use.

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