Digital Receptionist not accepting caller input

[southpaw1337]

Hi all, when calling into our digital receptionist, the options or extension number entry only works a limited number of times, depending on how many ports are opened. Internal calls to the Digital Receptionist on ext 800 work fine, and changing the Trunk to route calls directly to extensions etc works fine. Only external calls to our Digital Receptionist are affected.

Following the 3CX firewall guide I have opened double the number of ports that we have simultaneous calls, so in our case only 8 ports, starting from 9000. The digital receptionist only works 4 times before it stops accepting input, and then restarting the 3CX server fixes the issue for another 4 calls. Increasing the number of ports opened allows for more calls to work, up to 0.5x the number of opened ports.

Does the entire range of ports (9000-10999) need to be open? This would complicate things for my use case as port 10000 is needed for our card payment system in our business. Could we leave 10000 closed but the rest open? Another concern is would we still have a finite number of calls available before a restart is needed? Even with the full range of ports we would be limited to ~1000 calls if my logic above is correct.

Any ideas to remedy this would be appreciated, thank you.

 

[OlegR_3CX]

Hi there.
As we mentioned in our guides, the OS where the 3CX Phonesystem is running should be dedicated and that is one of the reasons, as other apps are using ports too. You will face an issue with the audio, and not sure if anything else can be there as we don't test all scenarios.

 

[Lee Cramman]

Hi all, when calling into our digital receptionist, the options or extension number entry only works a limited number of times, depending on how many ports are opened. Internal calls to the Digital Receptionist on ext 800 work fine, and changing the Trunk to route calls directly to extensions etc works fine. Only external calls to our Digital Receptionist are affected.

Following the 3CX firewall guide I have opened double the number of ports that we have simultaneous calls, so in our case only 8 ports, starting from 9000. The digital receptionist only works 4 times before it stops accepting input, and then restarting the 3CX server fixes the issue for another 4 calls. Increasing the number of ports opened allows for more calls to work, up to 0.5x the number of opened ports.

Does the entire range of ports (9000-10999) need to be open? This would complicate things for my use case as port 10000 is needed for our card payment system in our business. Could we leave 10000 closed but the rest open? Another concern is would we still have a finite number of calls available before a restart is needed? Even with the full range of ports we would be limited to ~1000 calls if my logic above is correct.

Any ideas to remedy this would be appreciated, thank you.

Your card machine will likely need port 10,000 OUTBOUND TCP. Your 3CX PBX will need 9000-10999 INBOUND UDP. Both can co-exist on the same router / network.

Each call requires 2 x inbound ports so, on paper, you need enough ports for 2 x number of max simultaneous calls. However, in my experience, opening up the full range in line with 3CX documentation makes future troubleshooting easier and keeps you in line with the documentation (not to mention, the firewall test will actually complete successfully). Once you have this, you will not need a restart to deal with running out of ports as you never will (unless you're doing >1,000 sim calls).

 

[SweetAction]

In case you need 10,000 open INBOUND for your credit card system (very strange), you will need to modify 3CX to not use that port. This of course is unsupported, but 3CX software knows the range of RTP ports it's allowed to use and any port it can't use needs to be removed from that range in 3CX. That range is stored in the media server ini file, which can only be access via SSH or similar - not in the 3CX UI. Pay special attention to the warning here: https://www.3cx.com/community/threads/change-port-9000.71160/post-315705

 

[NicholasP_3CX]

The server will allocate the ports automatically with each call.

It may be best to assign a different public IP Address to your credit card processor, or the PBX itself, so each of these machines can utilise port 10000.