Weirdest problem ever (Aastra 6867i)

Hi,

Hello everyone. I am writing this topic hoping I could be pointed to the right direction. There is an issue in one of our setup that we’ve been dealing with since almost a year now.

The setup: There is an “On Site” FreePBX 12.0.17 server, about 39 Aastra 6867i phones all plugged into a Netgear switch, 48 PoE ports. All phones get the power from that PoE switch. Mikrotik router and a modem. Dedicated network and internet connection, no other devices on the network beside the PBX and phones.

The issue: From what we know, almost all 39 Aastra phones show, from time to time, randomly, the “No Service” messages+red light. This can happend everyday, twice a day, once a week, not all phone at the same time. Every phone do it at a different time, no patterns.

Sometime, users won’t get disconnected from the call, even if the “No Service” light shows up. But then if the user finish the call and try to make a new one, not working. Sometime, the users will get disconnected from the call.

The facts:

  • FreePBX won’t notice the phones are “Offline”, no logs showing “Ext. 220 is now unreachable” or “Ext. 220 is now reacheable”, even though we configured the “Qualify” setting to 10 sec for all extensions. Freepbx would anyhow notice the no service ?

  • When the “No service” show up, pings continues to answer perfectly, this doesnt looks like a network problem. Cable was certified by a third party company.

  • SIP lines are configure with the IP address of the PBX. No hostname. Primary and secondary DNS are the router

  • Since the setup is local, this has nothing to do with the Internet Connection. Calls wouldn’t work, but this wouldn’t explain the “No Service” because the PBX would still be reachable.

  • Called Mitel to have some recommandation. Beside being told to set the SIP infos on the Line1 and the Server infos on the Global SIP tab, nothing really useful.

We tried many more things, but we still have the issue. Anyone has an idea of whatever we might try ?

Thank you very much.

Since it’s happening on all of the phones and the PBX isn’t noticing, it sounds like a phone problem. Since they are all powered over the network from the switch, is there any chance your switch might be having some kind of problem.

I’d look at the switch first.

Actually, I take that back - I’d look at the cable lengths first. If you are running long connections to the phone (or are adding plugs and jacks into the mix), you might be trying to pull too much power from the switch.

Just for giggles (and only for testing) can you add power-bricks to a few of the phones? If they don’t fail on wall power, it would lead me toward power distribution from the switch. I’d probably choose the phone furthest from the switch to start. If it’s not pulling power, that more power for the rest of the network.

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the answer. Actually, last year we though it was a switch problem, so we replaced it. I took a look at the power consumption and according to the switch, the phones require not that much (see picture under).

I never gave much tought about is the switch could indeed provide enough power, but that would of course worth trying. We wanted to install a second PoE switch to split the load or install power-bricks on the phones.

(PoE status below)

It’s just what I’d look at first. Using 73 watts in standby mode is one thing - try picking up a half dozen instruments and see what happens? You might find you consumed power shoots up quick, especially if you have a phone that’s “power hungry” (or working nominally).

Ok thanks, we will look at this. But on the other side, wouldn’t a power issue affect pings reply ? I pinged all devices for about 2 hours and didnt have a single timeout… Then I went more severe and configured the ping so it timeout at 500ms, got 9 timeout for like 4-5 devices over a period of 2 hours.

Two things come to mind:

  1. Years ago you would see ‘no service’ on Aastra phones if the NTP server was unreachable. Haven’t seen that issue in a very long time tho.\
  2. Your Asterisk version is not fully up to date and you are seeing what is commonly reported for Yealinks.

Yes, this could be https://issues.asterisk.org/jira/browse/ASTERISK-25476 (not just Yealink), but this usually manifests as the handset appearing to be fine, but Asterisk not passing calls to the handset, because Asterisk loses the registration while the handset maintains that it is registered.

I had a weird Mikrotik problem. Voicemail wouldn’t play or record. Local Asterisk box, everything else seemed fine.
Even though it was local, enabling SIP Direct Media on the Mikrotik NAT Helper cured it. Try that. Doesn’t seem to make sense, and maybe I’m not recalling it properly (perhaps it was voicemail from external calls, but I don’t think it was…)

click here for a picture

Hi guys, the issue you are talking about mostly look like Yealink phone showing that they are registered while Asterisk think its Unreachable, but what I’m having is actually the inverse. All phone are registered from the Asterisk chan_sip while the phone itself show “No service”.

However, it might worth it to look at the Mikrotik. Currently, all phones are plugges into the Netgear switch, but the Asterisk server is plugged directly into the main Mikrotik router. I will try to plug the Freepbx right into the switch with the phone and try to bypass the router.

As for the SIP Direct Media, I don’t know about that feature/configuration. I will read about it, could help.

Thanks

Yes that’s what I thought - you have the opposite problem. Do try the Mikrotik SIP Direct Media if it’s not already enabled - my system didn’t work properly without it anyway, or with the whole NAT helper (alg) disabled either.

I had to reboot the Mikrotik when re-enabling the NAT helper as a whole, before the connections would show as identified as ‘sip’ in the conntrack tables, so I’d do a reboot after changing, just in case.

Hi. Any updates on this?

Did this issue ever get fixed? I am having the same problem. Freepbx shows phones registered but phones show “no service” - Aastra 6865i.
I am currently rebooting the PBX to fix the issue temporarily.

Thanks

What version of Asterisk? Are you seeing this:

Asterisk 13.26.0. I was not aware of this. I will downgrade asterisk to fix this.
Thanks.

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If you read the message you can still upgrade to 13.26-3 which has the issue fixed.