MAC address in use.

[edwindrood]

I am stumped. I suspect the end-user (who I made an admin) accidentally deleted the "user account" without first removing the phone from the account. Now when I want to provision the phone it says the MAC address is in use. I now have a phone which cannot be used.

(this happened twice, so I actually have two of these. The Yealink Phones show up in the list of active phones, but are not associated with a user. The phones are able to make out-bound calls, but are static as to managing them, since they do not exist under any user.

I would like to completely eradicate these MAC address for these two phones so I can start over (create the user and assign the phone to the user.)

I cannot add either of these two phones to any user because I get the message that the MAC address is already in use.

Here is what I have tried:
in one instance extension 106 for Robert the "User account" is completely gone. There is no user of that name and no extension there. Completely gone.
In the phones tab I can see the phone for ext 106 with the MAC address. It is listed as an active phone, but cannot be managed.

I tried factory resetting the phone for ext 106 and now I see the MAC address goes blank for that "active" phone. When I add the correct provisioning URL into the phone )from the web interface) and reboot the phone it finds a file for that MAC address and re-proviisions it with old (static) information.

I am stuck.

This is a small office using the 3CX cloud (I have no access to an SSH console).

 

[TheodorosG_3CX]

This shouldn't be the case as deleting the extension will also remove the ip phone and all extension information.
Have you searched in the Users for this mac address?

 

[KyriacosS_3CX]

ext 106

Can you add that extension again and then do the reset/reprovision for that phone? Perhaps that will bring it back normally so that it can just be deleted.

 

[edwindrood]

No, I cannot add extension 106 or 109 back It does not let me re-use those numbers. Yes, I have searched (there are only 6 users) for either of those two mac address and it cannot be found.

It is looking like I am completely blocked from using extension 106 and 109 and I am completely blocked from using mac address 805E0C7E09D8 or 805E0C7E0712.

As I mentioned, the two mac addresses show up in the list of active phones, but I cannot do anything with them there.
If I factory reset the phone the MAC address dis-appears from the orphaned phone, but the orphan phone (with the extension) is still in the list of active phones (shows as an extension with no mac address).

If I put the URL in the provision field of the factory-defaulted phone and restart the phone, it will find the file (by mac address) and it comes back up as if it is provisioned -- but it is back again as an orphaned phone that cannot be updated.

 

[edwindrood]

I am really curious as to what happened to cause this situation. There were originally 8 people in that office and three people quit at the same time. It was then that I made the owner of the business the 3CX "System Owner" because some changes needed to be made. Nobody has deleted the user extensions for the three who quit. In fact, they still want all the same desk-phones in the office to ring with the ring group. The owner of the business only wanted to remove smart-phone access and remove mobile numbers from the folks who quit.

It was after this that the two extensions (who were supervisors and not one of the folks who quit) got deleted. (what ever happened, these two extensions that got deleted was totally not wanted or needed -- it was by accident) I suspect that the bug in 3CX is caused by deleting the extension while the user extension still had an active phone and still had an active smartphone login.

In the future -- because of this 3CX bug -- do not delete an extension until you have first removed the desk-phone and removed the smart-phone authentication first. There seems to be no way to recover from this (using the normal admin interface)

It may be possible for me to do a backup, and see if I can edit the backup file, and then do a restore -- but that is a lot of work that I would not do without testing it first in a test environment.

 

[CentrexJ]

Check the voice and chat section and see if those extensions exist as an SBC and delete them. That will release the MAC.

 

[ivank]

No, I cannot add extension 106 or 109 back It does not let me re-use those numbers. Yes, I have searched (there are only 6 users) for either of those two mac address and it cannot be found.

Could you check the audit log to see what exactly happened to these users?

 

[JohnS_3CX]

@edwindrood you cannot create those users, the phones are registered, you cannot re-add those MACs.

This spells out that they exist but you simply cannot see them when you log in since you probably don't have sufficient rights.

Start from there, are you still a System Owner or has your role been changed perhaps? And as ivank said, you can also check the audit log.