Few Ongoing Issues with New Install

[Matthewh]

We have just installed 3CX to replace our aged Asterisk system and are having a few lingering problems:

We have double and sometimes triple transfers on digital receptionist, by this I mean the following:

Customer calls in, Digital Receptionist answers and plays message, customer picks any option doesn't matter which and the following happens:

"please wait while we transfer your call" > MOH > Silence > "please wait while we transfer your call" > MOH > Silence > "please wait while we transfer your call" > MOH > Agent picks up

Sometimes its only a double transfer and sometimes its a triple, nothing in the settings seems to indicate why its doing this.

secondly when a user does a transfer, they dial the extension and press transfer, the person at the other end sees their phone ring, it stops then it starts ringing again with the transferred call, this creates a "Missed call" message and the originator of the transfer sees their phone ring again for 1 second just before it transfers to the target.

We are also looking at how to set a distinctive ringtone on particular handsets using the configuration templates that overrides "internal" and "external" call types, basically we want certain handsets regardless of the origin of the call to ring with a special ringtone so we know its that handset ringing and people can pick it up.

We are also having some issues with external users which I believe is related to firewalls but despite putting the users phone IP address into the DMZ calls still cannot go through, basically if they call me it works and we can hear each other, if I call them they sometimes cant pickup the call at all (phone says answering and nothing happens, then they put the phone down and it rings but they cant answer it) or if it does work I can hear them byt they cant hear me.

Phone model is the Cisco SPA514G and it is on firmware 7.5.5

Lastly on the cisco phones we are unable to get the XML phonebook to work, the phonebook file is created and it has data in it but the phones cant read it, it just says "failed" when you click on the button on the phone, I believe this to be because the files contains more than 32 items (limit for cisco phones), I have found on the cisco website that it says you should have a second, third and fourth file that in subsequent html requests should be delivered to the phone but I cant find anyway to make that actually work, anyone got an idea?

Any advice on any of the issues is welcomed

 

[lneblett]

We need some more information:

A copy of the log for the digital receptionist will help immensely. It may not be an issue with the DR settings, but could be the result of a number of things, mostly related to the extension settings and/or the phone settings.

How were the phones provisioned - manually or via 3CX? Were the phones factory reset prior to attaching to the 3CX system? I am assuming that they were in use with the Asterisk system and may still contain some residual settings from that system as the 3CX templates do not re-write every available option/field. If you have not already done so, I suggest doing the factory reset on a couple of phones, then allowing 3CX to provision (using the default, unaltered template) and then re-test.

I am uncertain what is meant by "putting the users' phone IP into the DMZ" for external users. Does this mean that for the remote phones there is a remote DMZ in which the phones are associated? It would be helpful to know if there is one phone or multiple phones at a given location. The same issue for the factory reset on these as well. Have you forwarded the ports and passed the firewall checker?

You have raised a number of issues, so let's focus on the factory reset and provisioning with the default template on the internal aspect first. Once this is working we can then go external.

 

[Matthewh]

I will get the logs out, the phones were factory reset before provisioning, I am planning to reset them again, the Cisco SPA514G were provisioned using the 3CX system, we have some older phones that are manually configured and they all work fine.

In regards to the DMZ these are individual users on their own home broadband (directors and senior staff have their own phones at home as well as some home workers) now 90% of them are fine but one or two have real issues with one way audio, I have logged into one such users firewall and added the IP address of the phone into the DMZ so that it should be fully exposed on all ports but still only getting one way audio.

All internal phones work perfectly fine with no issues other than the cisco phonebook.

 

[Pierre_3CX]

Hi all,
Please check v12.5 RC for new cisco phonebook server which gets rid of limitations in memory and max num of entries.

 

[lneblett]

Please advise when reset and manually provisioned, or provisioned with the default template from 3CX. As I indicated, it is usually best to approach multiple issues one step at a time starting with the base operation. If this works, which it should given your indication that the other manually provisioned phones "work fine". You have me a little confused as you also state that all internal phones are working fine; yet the first issues raised was about the multiple transfers from the DR. You did not indicate if this is now resolved or if it only involved remote phones.

As far as the remote phones -

First, does the firewall checker pass?

You did not indicate who could hear who and under what circumstances the issue occurred. Can the remote phones dial an internal extension back at the main office (where 3CX is located) and get audio in both directions? What if the main office dials the remote? What about external calls coming and going? Which side is not getting audio? I assume that you setup using the 3CX Cisco remote provisioning guide (on the blog). I further assume that there is only one phone behind each router at the remote sites. Is the PBX providing audio on the remote extensions? Depending upon the circumstances, what will sometimes occur is that the extension may support a reinvite and when it does this the system will attempt to hand off the audio to the phone. The phone only knows its internal IP and will pass this back in the SDP and the system will then attempt to deliver the audio directly to the phone's internal IP, which of course will never traverse the remote router. This may be a reason why putting the phone in the remote DMZ still failed. If you have done so already, please check the blog for remote phone setup. Reinvites internal to the LAN are great as the audio streams are handled by the phones and offload some of the work from the 3CX server.

 

[leejor]

I addition to the questions that Ineblett asks...I have to say that putting a SIP device in DMZ may not be the best way to proceed when a single phone (VoIP device) is being used at a remote location. I've found that even without assigning a fixed IP and having to resort to port forwarding, most single VoIP devices, when used as a 3CX extension, have no issues behind a home router.

Of course, home routers that also have VoIP handling (provide VoIP service), require some additional "tweaking" to the set up.