Option to enter SBC IP/DNS name has been removed?

[TechResponse-Matt]

Following a recent update it would seem that the entry for SBC under Phone Provisioning is now a drop-down with a list of SBCs with no ability to enter IPs or DNS names as before.

This is catastrophic for us as we are using DNS resolution to manage failover etc on a system with lots of sites.

Is there a workaround for this?!

 

[SweetAction]

There's a thread in partner forum where this was discussed and Nick was clear that it was never intended for use that way and won't be coming back.

I hear you on the loss of functionality as we too used it that way and need to come up with a new option / method to handle.

 

[TechResponse-Matt]

Well that's annoying...

We have been using it to redirect phones en-masse to a different SBC when one fails, without having to manually reconfigure every phone at the site that's had an SBC issue.

It meant we could modify a DNS record and return the site to service in the TTL of like a minute, rather than having to reprovision every device...

3CX - this is very disappointing :-(

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Take a look at this and give it a try to see how it behaves.
Might be a good solution for your use case:
https://www.3cx.com/docs/sbc-high-availability-cluster/

 

[TechResponse-Matt]

That would be a workaround of sorts but would require two SBCs at each location which for a company with lots of sites is a not-insignificant cost to implement...

On the actual phones you can enter whatever you like as a SIP proxy so it seems bizarre that 3CX would deliberately remove this functionality in the phone provisioning and break things for some customers for no obvious benefit...

 

[JohnS_3CX]

The benefit will become more obvious once we release embedded-SBC firmware on some select phone models in the near future.

But do keep in mind, even though the previous method may have served you, it was more of a convenient "hack" and not really intended to be used that way.

 

[TechResponse-Matt]

There was nothing about the box on the form that said you couldn't enter a DNS name and DNS names worked - I am sure the workaround will be great for those it affects but your change has broken our system without any obvious notice that this was about to happen!