Starting 3CX phone in "out of the office" mode

[Lukas]

Hello! I have just upgraded to V12. For what I have been able to see, everytime I launch 3CX phone it starts in "in the office" mode. Instead, all of our users are "out of the office", and need to use the tunnel to connect to the PBX (which runs in a remote server directly connected to the internet -- thus no LAN access for anyone).

Is there a way to make it so that 3CX Phone always starts in "out of the office" mode?

Thank you!

 

[rudolf5]

Hi,
maybe you can try the option "Use 3CX Tunnel"?! You can set this option in the "3CXPhone" Tab by double Clicking on your extension. I think you have to send a new Welcome message to your users to get this option working.
Hope this helps.

 

[Lukas]

Thanks, Rudolf -- it's indeed what I was trying to achieve -- but so far it seems that 3CX phone is unable to recognize that the remote extensions are "out of the office" and consider them to be "in the office". When they are considered "in the office" the tunnel is not being used, and that results in one-way audio.

When the extensions are manually set as "out of the office" the tunnel kicks in, and magically solves all the problems (we have users connecting with a variety of dongles, routers etc., and the tunnel does a wonderful job of getting them all logged in).

I read in the manual that the 3CX phone is supposed to automatically understand whether the extension is "in the office" or "out of the office". It would be helpful to know what are the rules that trigger the "out of the office" status, so that I can check why our remote extensions do not seem to comply.

Any help would be truly appreciated... thank you!

 

[leejor]

I read in the manual that the 3CX phone is supposed to automatically understand whether the extension is "in the office" or "out of the office". It would be helpful to know what are the rules that trigger the "out of the office" status, so that I can check why our remote extensions do not seem to comply.

I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the subnet the local PC is using and the subnet that has been put in as the local IP of the 3CX server. For example, if the PC running the 3CX Phone had an IP of 192.168.0.34 and the local IP of the 3Cx server were 192.168.0.10, then the 3CX phone may believe that it is on the same network as the server. If that is the way you are set-up, then it may solve your problem if perhaps you tried changing the subnet at one end. Of course, that is easier said than done, in many cases.

 

[ian.watts]

Indeed, leejor is on a good trail about network connectivity.

I tend to use host names where I can.. for both the "internal" and "external" addresses for 3CX.
It is akin to DirectAccess.. if it cannot resolve the "local/internal" addresses, the phone will change and try to use the "remote/external" address specified.

So the idea, then, is to use whatever host locally which will not resolve remotely.. ideally. It was slightly trickier for my own office, where our AD FQDN is the same as our external FQDN (was before my time.. else would not have happened..).

On the phone, I see it try the "in office" attempt first.. then changes to the "out of office" host, and connects quickly after that.

 

[Lukas]

Thank you so very much for your input! I think you put me on the good track -- now I have just one little bit missing...

I manually configured the phone client with an "in the office" address of "wrong.pbx.com" and for the out of office address I have the correct "my.pbx.com". As long as I do not check the reprovisioning url box this setup works exactly as you said.

However, if the reprovisioning url is enabled, at every restart the client will re-configure itself with the IP address of the server, which is the same both for the in-the-office and the out-of-the-office setup (and thanks to your explanation I now understand that this is where the problem begins).

So I guess that the question I should ask is "how do I make it so that the configuration xml is generated with a 'bogus' address for the in-the-office section and the correct address for the out-of-office section?"

Thank you for your kind assistance!

 

[leejor]

I assume that you would either manually edit the configuration file, or change the settings to stop the 3CX phone from downloading a config file after it is set-up the way you want it.

 

[Lukas]

Ended up by:

1 -- entering a fake address for the in-the-office server address

2 -- disabling the provisioning url feature.

Not impressed by V12.