Polycom VVX410 - "Stuck" Line

FreePBX Endpoints
1

Our operators intermittently get a call that’s ‘stuck’ on a line - they’re using VVX410 phones with a 40-line sidecar on the latest firmware. One of them believes it might have something to do with something weird happening when transferring a call, but that’s the extent of our knowledge of how it happens. :man_facepalming:

In short, the line button turns red and bricks the phone until it’s rebooted - pressing that line key does nothing and incoming calls do not ring on any of the lines. Going into the phone menus and telling it to reboot does not work. Logging into the phone via the GUI and telling it to reboot does not work. Only way I’ve found to recover it is to unplug the ethernet supplying power to the phone for a few seconds. I’m working remote today and it happened again, so I snagged the logs. I issued a phone restart command & maybe 30 seconds later, the phone rebooted. (My suspicion is that whatever had the line locked had timed out by this point rather than the restart doing anything at all.) There are dozens of these lines in it:

0304122502|so   |4|00|safeRestart: reboot is already in progress.

My questions are 3-fold:

  1. Does anyone have any idea of what might be causing this? I realize that it’s not a lot to go on. It only happens a couple times a year, so I don’t want to spend a ton of time / effort on tracking down the cause, but I do find it annoying to not be able to figure it out.
  2. The presence of safeRestart in the logs implies that there’s a forceRestart option available. Does anyone know how I could force the phone to reboot apart from pulling the power from it? (Preferably remotely as I work from the recliner in my living room 2 days a week.)
  3. Has anyone else seen this behavior?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

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I don’t know the cause but I can confirm that this is a thing with Polycom phones. I have also seen it the other way - that is - the Polycom phone will not put a button red but any other phone that has the Polycom’s extension as a BLF key will show the phone as in use. Asterisk status shows the polycom phone as off-hook in use, but the phone itself doesn’t think it’s off hook.

Rebooting the FreePBX server also fixes the problem. LOL

You can remotely login to the Polycom phone with a web browser and there’s a reboot phone option in the phone’s menu

You can “backrev” from the Polycom VVX models to the Polycom SoundpointIP models and fix the problem that way. However the Soundpoint firmware has some bugs that you may or may not trigger in your environment. Among other things they have broken MTU Path discovery.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the Polys and I also do like that the VVXes are one of the few models that work properly over a tunnel (the Soundpoints don’t) but the world is full of used VoIP phones very cheap and life is too short to troubleshoot bugs for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (the owner of Poly, now)