Some Polycom BLF Buttons Somewhat Inop

FreePBX Endpoints
1

This is a weird one.

I’ve set up our 3 operator’s Polycom VVX410 phones each with a single VVX-1 40-line expansion module. They are all configured with the same template. Each button is configured as a BLF for a different extension in the store. This allows the operators to see if someone is on the phone or not & also use it as a quick way to transfer calls.

During a storm about a month ago, we lost power & the UPS in the rack housing our PBX & core switch didn’t hold until the generator kicked on. I’ve already replaced the batteries in the UPS so it should not happen again, but that doesn’t help what’s now happening. You’re going to think I’m crazy with this description, but I swear that it’s exactly what’s happening & it started after everything came back on after the power failure.

The BLF buttons are working fine… for all the phones in our main building. We have a separate building that is connected via a fiber optic line to our core switch. All the phones located in that building, the BLFs only partially work for. By partially work, I mean just that - if I call one of their DIDs, I can see the BLF blink green (indicating that the phone is ringing) for about a quarter of a second, then it goes dark again. When someone picks up their phone, you can see a flash of red (indicating the phone is in use), but it immediately goes dark again. You can press the BLF and it dials the extension as normal, but the lights indicating the status aren’t functioning properly.

The self-test on the operator phones show the hardware is fine.

I’ve rebuilt the configuration for the operator phones & rebooted them, but this has had no effect.

We’ve had people have change desks between the buildings since this began - the problem stays with the phones in the outbuilding. When an affected phone was brought to our main building, the BLF behaves normally.

The switches are both working and passing data. The phones are functioning fine, can make & receive calls, the PCs hanging off of them are fine, and I can log into the GUIs on the phones. On a long shot, I had the company that manages our switches do a controlled reboot on both our core switch and the one in the outbuilding after hours one night, but it made no difference at all.

.

At this point, I honestly do not know what to try next as far as troubleshooting. It’s so weird that it’s only affecting phones that are hanging off of one specific switch, that the lights are coming on for a fraction of a second indicating the operator phones are getting some type of signal that these phones are active, and that nothing changed configuration wise on anything - the power simply went out & came back on. :man_shrugging: I’d appreciate any help or suggestions.

2

Are these phones getting power via POE? If so, have you checked the POE budget/allocation for the switchports between phones that work and do not work, to see if they’re identical? I’ve never experienced this specific problem before, but if a switch is providing less power than the phone needs, “weird things may happen”.

3

They are indeed powered via PoE, but nothing has really changed for a very long time. I will review how many phones and how much power is being drawn from the switch in the outbuilding. I’ve got a bunch of power bricks for the phones from before we had a PoE switch in that building; maybe I’ll plug a few in to lighten the power draw from the switch and see if it affects anything. Maybe the power failure damaged the PSU in the switch somehow?!???

Interestingly, I was digging into the logs for a different issue & found that the line status is being updated for the operator phones. (Which makes sense, given that the operator phone BLF button lights DO show the state changes, just not for as long as they should. :thinking: )

4

That’d be my vote. Besides the power brick idea, buy a cheap Netgear 8 port PoE switch, plug it in to the switch in that building, plug in a phone, and see if it works.

If your switches are enterprise, they will not only have logs in the switch they will self-monitor the power supplies and issue warnings if the PoE supply to a port drops voltage. (all bets are off if they are Meraki which rank up there as the worst ethernet switches ever manufactured)

5

Or do not spend money and just use the old PSUs for the phone from before switching to PoE

6

I believe I’ve discovered the cause of this… and feel like an idiot.

When I was installing power bricks on a few phones, I noticed a green :right_arrow: on the phone, indicating forwarding. I asked and the sales person said that she had her phone forwarded to her cell phone so she wouldn’t miss sales calls from our operators. (Coincidentally, they all did this the same day as our the power failure mentioned above.) Unfortunately, this means that any transferred or calls direct to her DID were silently failing.

During a tent sale years ago, I discovered that the PBX is sending forwarded calls out with the calling number as the source, which our provider rejects due to our not owning the number. They told me to set the source number in a specific SIP header, but I couldn’t figure out how to make that happen after 2-3 days. By that time the tent sale was over and my ‘solution’ was to simply disable forwarding, which the owner was fine with as we’d had problems in the past of people leaving & nobody noticing the desk phone was forwarded to a cell. :man_facepalming:

After swapping our Cisco 7960 phones with the Polycoms, I thought I’d disabled forwarding on them as well, but apparently the config option I set only disabled the forward softkey - sales people apparently have enough time to dig through the phone menus looking for stuff like this.

I’ve since found the option to completely disable forwarding - feature.forward.enable=“0” under in MAC-Features.cfg in Basefile Editor. Two of the sales people ignored their manager’s direction to remove it before they left for the day, so I logged into the phone & manually removed it for them. One more salesman thought I might do something like this and didn’t want it done to her’s, so she unplugged her phone to prevent me from removing the forwarding from her phone… naturally, I did this to hers during business hours, resulting in her phone rebooting while she was on it. :flushed_face: (That’ll teach her to try that kind of crap with IT people… :rofl: )

After removing all the forwarding and disabling it, the BLF buttons seem to behaving normally.

.

One more question… when I load up the extension list in the PBX, there are several that have a check mark in the CF column. I’ve confirmed that forwarding is turned off on the phones and that calls going to it are not forwarded, so I assume it’s just a display anomaly. I’ve tried Lorne’s pay it forward script to disable forwarding on these extensions, but the check is still there. It really doesn’t matter from a functionality standpoint, but it’s like the system is taunting me… :joy: How would I go about turning it off?