Solved Trouble with BLFs after moving desk phone to new site

[Fred Dickey]

So I have a 3CX Pro license, my 3CX server is hosted on a VPS in the cloud and I have three desk phones, all Grandstream GPX-2160's. I'm running the latest version 16 of 3CX and just integrated it with Office 365 which I don't think would be related to my issue.

I just moved one of the Grandstreams from my home office to an employee's home office at their home. We both have the same ISP. The Grandstream logs into the 3CX server just fine and registers. Problem is that my BLFs are all kind of wacky now, at least on the right hand side of the phone. For example, none of the LED's on the side of the phone are lighting up correctly. The BLFs on the left side of the display screen work flawlessly. Four of the BLFs are set to Shared Parking 0 thru 3. They work if you push them but the LEDs don't work. Three of the BLFs are programmed to our extensions. They don't light up at all unless a call comes in from the outside then the extension that answered it begins to blink red and never stops blinking. Also, pushing a BLF associated with an extension does absolutely nothing so you have to manually dial the extension number to call it.

All statuses work fine in the web client at the remote location. This phone was working just fine at my home office.

I have deleted the phone from the system and re-provisioned it to see if that would resolve the issue, but it didn't.

Any ideas?

 

[Fred Dickey]

I got back to my home office last night and the two phones at that location are functioning completely normal even after power cycling them. Not sure what the issue could be since all three phones are Direct Sip (Stun Remote) connections to a cloud based server and both locations have the same ISP with plain vanillla residental NATs. Actually my home office is the more complex setup since it is a double NAT that my phones are behind and they all function normally.

I'm going to take a second phone on a second extension to the other remote office and see if it's BLF lights malfunction like the first phone. If it does, then I know it's something to do with the internet router/connection or some security setting on my server. If it doesn't then I will try assigning the phone to a new extension and see if the BLF issue remains.

 

[Evolute IT]

I got back to my home office last night and the two phones at that location are functioning completely normal even after power cycling them. Not sure what the issue could be since all three phones are Direct Sip (Stun Remote) connections to a cloud based server and both locations have the same ISP with plain vanillla residental NATs. Actually my home office is the more complex setup since it is a double NAT that my phones are behind and they all function normally.

I'm going to take a second phone on a second extension to the other remote office and see if it's BLF lights malfunction like the first phone. If it does, then I know it's something to do with the internet router/connection or some security setting on my server. If it doesn't then I will try assigning the phone to a new extension and see if the BLF issue remains.

Why not use SBC? Multiple phones behind the same NAT in Direct SIP is not the best way to do it.

 

[Fred Dickey]

Why not use SBC? Multiple phones behind the same NAT in Direct SIP is not the best way to do it.

I will give that a try with SBC. I took a second physical phone to the same remote location and it did the exact same thing with the BLF's so I now know it's not just that phone or just that extension.

 

[Fred Dickey]

Switching the extension to SBC, deleting the phone, factory resetting the phone and reprovisioning using the automatic provisioning of SBC resolved the issue.

Thank you!

I hadn't used SBC before but after googling more about it, it has a lot of benefits including the auto provision function. Only downside is that a Windows endpoint must be running it at all times but that's not too big of a trade off. I simply set the work computer I have setup at my employee's house to not go to sleep.

 

[craigreilly]

Only downside is that a Windows endpoint must be running it at all times but that's not too big of a trade off.

Not really... you can run an SBC on a Raspberry Pi.
https://www.3cx.com/docs/3cx-tunnel-session-border-controller/

 

[Evolute IT]

Not really... you can run an SBC on a Raspberry Pi.
https://www.3cx.com/docs/3cx-tunnel-session-border-controller/

It can also run on a small Debian 9 machine. During manual installation of 3CX or even with the ISO, you can choose to install the SBC.