Trunk stuck registering

Have an older FreePBX system at a site that I “inherited” the management of… we have issues intermittently at that location where the trunks simply get stuck in the registration process. The guys there usually use their cels to make outbound calls, so unless they actually happen to try to make a call from a desk phone and get the “all circuits are busy now” recording it could be a couple of days before anybody realizes that the trunks are down (unless somebody tries the VOIP line and then gets ahold of them on their cel to let them know). The problem is usually caused by the internet connection used by the trunks being down (I think).

Host dnsmgr Username Refresh State Reg.Time
provider.one:5060 N xxxx_xxx 120 Request Sent
provider.two:5060 N xxxx_xxx 120 Request Sent

How can I generate a notification when the trunks are stuck in this state? I have another way that I can get the notification out, if I can get FreePBX to just raise the SOS.

This is often caused by intermittent network outages that cause DNS to fail, which in turn can cause the Chan-SIP trunk to lock up. It’s a known limitation of Chan-SIP and one of the reasons it is deprecated.

I recommend you upgrade your system to the latest FreePBX version and convert your Chan-SIP connections to PJ-SIP. It seems to me that we have a conversion tool that will help you make that happen - check Changing from Chan_sip to pjsip and see if anything in there might help you.

I wish that it were the DNS failure issue, which I’ve dealt with far too many times… but I don’t think it is in this case. Every time I’ve had to deal with that issue all of the extensions lose their registrations also and all heck breaks loose, but at least that makes the issue noticeable to the end users. In this case unless you are actually trying to dial out, or dial in there is no indication whatsoever that anything has gone wrong.

As far as upgrades, suffice it to say many things have been quoted and all have been put on hold for economic reasons. The IT mandate at this point is basically “keep it running”, so fudge it is about as best as it gets.

Let me see if I understand your position.

It’s cheaper to spend money on overtime and lost productivity for the entire company that it is to perform the free upgrades to the newest version of FreePBX (which is free in both the “free beer and free speech” model)? One tech over the weekend could knock this down for you.

The DNS problem isn’t a DNS problem, it’s a Chan-SIP problem, in that when it loses DNS connectivity, it locks out the trunks and deafens your machine.

If you want to spend a bunch of time, you can look back through the forum and find several notification scripts that launch when you lose trunks. The long-term (and cheap) fix is to just get the system up to date and upgrade your connections from Chan-SIP to PJ-SIP so that intermittent DNS failures or network glitches stop killing your connections.

The former is labor intensive forever and becomes a perpetual cost burden. The latter is a one-time cost and should reduce your overhead costs by improving productivity and free up more of your time to do “the other” IT stuff that needs to be done. Moving your support of the telephony services back from variable overhead to fixed service costs should be an easy one for even the most recalcitrant comptroller to understand.

Of course, the choice is yours and I (for one) will do what I can to support your position. Let us know if you need more support.

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