Out of Office Hours Timezone Problem

[EdanBrooke]

Hi all,

I'm working for a company as a web developer and have taken on the task of installing and maintaining their 3CX instance. My boss has requested that the phone not ring outside of office hours, so I thought "Great, that's easy enough, I'll just configure an out of hours destination."

I awoke this morning to a message from the operations manager stating that no calls were coming through and that the phone was in out of hours mode and shouldn't be. Upon investigation, I found that it is likely to be a timezones issue.

We are based in the United Kingdom, which follows Daylight Savings (DST). The server is configured to use UTC. In 3CX timezone settings, 00:00 United Kingdom (London) is selected. However, the clock is still behind by an hour and voicemail timestamps are also behind by 1 hour.
However, elements such as the event logs are in UK time as expected.

Any solid solution to this that doesn't break when we go from BST (GMT+1) back into GMT would be appreciated.

Kind regards,
Edan Brooke

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

Hello @EdanBrooke,

Please note that the 3CX phone system uses the time of the server host to switch to in or out of office hours. The timezone in the PBX settings is used for provisioning phones to the correct time zone. So make sure that the host time is correct and try again

 

[EdanBrooke]

Hello @EdanBrooke,

Please note that the 3CX phone system uses the time of the server host to switch to in or out of office hours. The timezone in the PBX settings is used for provisioning phones to the correct time zone. So make sure that the host time is correct and try again

Hello and thank you for replying,

My problem is that the server isn't in London. Should I change it to London regardless of the server's geographical location?

Kind regards,
Edan Brooke

 

[Saqqara]

It does not matter where the server is , the timezone can be any of the options - the main thing is where the phones are

As above, change the time zone to London, and everything should work at it should

 

[EdanBrooke]

Hi @Saqqara

Thanks for your reply: I will try this and see how it goes.

Kind regards,
Edan Brooke

 

[EdanBrooke]

You have received a new voice mail from "102 -"Edan Brooke"

From:102
To: 102" - "Edan" "Brooke"
Received:"2017-07-14 09:21:32"
Duration:"00:00:10"
 File:"vmail_102_102_20170714092132"

This message was actually received at 10:21:32. Do I need to reboot the PBX for the changes to take effect? As it's in a production environment and I want to try and avoid disruption.

 

[Dennis Little]

@EdanBrooke did you find a resolution to your problem? I am also experiencing the same issue on 15.5

The server has been configured for my local time zone and the 3CX logs seem to show correct local times. However, my calls go to after-hours IVR during office hours.

 

[EdanBrooke]

@EdanBrooke did you find a resolution to your problem? I am also experiencing the same issue on 15.5

The server has been configured for my local time zone and the 3CX logs seem to show correct local times. However, my calls go to after-hours IVR during office hours.

Not as of yet: if I remember, I'll restart the server this weekend when the company isn't receiving calls and see if that fixes the problem. (After changing the server's timezone)

 

[Dennis Little]

@EdanBrooke thank you for your quick reply.

FYI, global Office Hours operates correctly following local timezone setting change and server reboot; I was not able to immediately figure out which 3CX daemon would need to be restarted so that 3CX read new local server time.

On a side now, it seems odd that 3CX doesn't follow the timezone defined in web settings and instead reads the local UTC time of the server; I presumed that Office Hours would follow that same timezone setting, mistakenly. Apparently the web-based timezone setting is only for phones provisioned through 3CX.

For those provisioning through PBX Express on Amazon Web Services (AWS), on a Debian VM, you can fix the Office Hours issue:

• SSH to your AWS VM
• sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
• Set correct local timezone
• Reboot VM
• 3CX Office Hours should now work as expected

 

[AGidi]

I had the same issue.

You need to do as Dennis said.
Set the servers time
Set the servers timezone
Set the 3CX timezone
restart the 3cx or the whole vps.

For reference look at the chart in the dashboard. Should have the same time if its local to your location.

 

[EdanBrooke]

I will restart the VPS tomorrow once I've cleared this with my boss. Hopefully it will work

 

[AGidi]

You can try and restar the services from the dashboard. Click on the services display. Select them all. Restart. Cross fingers.
Takes about 30 secs.

Best luck

 

[EdanBrooke]

Hi,

I re-started the server Friday evening and that's fixed timestamps on voicemail notification e-mails so I guess that'd fix out of office hours also.
Fantastic!

Thanks all.