experienced a major internal network outage that impacted 192 routers across the company. Needless to say, this isolated call centers, ACDs, HTTP and even DHCP servers. I have 2 observations about how the phones responded to the WAN outage.
1) When the 9641G lost connectivity to the PBX for an extended period of time (which includes the 4622 phones as well) the phones would kick off a self-reboot. After this self-reboot, and with no access to the HTTP servers, the phones would simply go back into the Discovery mode. Then, once connectivity was restored the phone reconnected with the PBX but it appears that not all of the original settings from the 46xxsettings file were retained. For example, the craft password remained, but entries to remove all of the unwanted Icons from the Menu (Calculator, Weather, etc) were no longer present and we saw the Icons again. I’m not sure how the call center settings faired. I believe they are lost as well, from reports during the outage. The problem is, there’s no way for me to tell remotely whether the phones are in this state or not. Physically I can just press the Menu button and look at the Icons displayed, but that’s hard to do remotely. Of course, a reboot of the phone will reload the 46xxsettings file and all is fine. You could say, when in doubt just reboot all of the phones, but then we may create another issue with DHCP IP address exhaustion, which we experienced as well.
Here’s my testing scenario to duplicate the issue. Remove network connectivity from the phone, but without removing power from it. (You can do this using a power brick and removing the Ethernet connection at the data switch, or like me, I removed the network connectivity from my PoE switch.) Wait for the timer to kick off a reboot of the phone. After the reboot, when it goes back to Discovering, restore network connectivity. After the phone reconnects with the ACD, check the phone for it’s 46xxsettings. (I use the Icon deactivation, as it’s easy to recognize on the phone.)
- Can Avaya tell us which 46xxsettings options are carried over after the phone reconnects after the automatic reboot?
- Is there a way for the phone to retain all of it’s settings after a reboot if the HTTP server is inaccessible? Retain it’s last successful 46xxsettings file values?
2) We also experienced issues with DHCP IP address exhaustion at some sites (about 30% of the sites on each switch roughly), as the phones and PCs are all trying to pull from the data VLAN at the same time. I was looking at the 46xxsettings file and found 2 settings that we just left in the defaults, DHCPSTD and REREGISTER.
a. DHCPSTD has a default of 0 (which we use) that says to “continue using the address in an extended rebinding state”. Setting 1 says to “immediately stop using the address”. Would changing this to 1 and immediately stopping use of an IP address help mitigate the issue of having DHCP IP exhaustion, where no more addresses are available? Or, would it make the issue worse?
b. REREGISTER is set to 20 min, which is the default. Is this the timer that kicks off a phone’s self-reboot? Would extending this timer help alleviate any DHCP IP exhaustion issues, or would it have other far reaching impacts? I notice that when the phone is idle and the network connectivity with the PBX is lost the phone’s display still appears as if it’s connected to the PBX. Does this value help identify when the phone is really down to the user, or kick off the Discovering message?
it appears as if the call center settings aren’t retained either. For example, he noticed that the AGTACTIVESK value was changed and either the entire CALLCTRSTAT or just the AGTGREETINGSTAT value was changed.
He also mentioned that a busy/release type of reboot didn’t help so they had to do a physical RESTART PHONE from each device to restore it. (Kind of opposite the agent greeting recording issue.)
Also, all of these 9641G phones are running 6.3 firmware (6.3037).
