Yealink's re-registering

[GManNAtl]

I was having network problems with a site connected via VPN so I decided to turn on the email option so that I would know when phones changed their registration status. This worked well, to know when this site went down, but what I discovered is that all of my other phones were constantly un-registering and re-registering all throughout the day. Most of the phones are T22's running 7.70.0.141, but there are a handfull of higher models. From what I can tell there doesn't seem to be any negative affect on the operation. I don't know if it is just happening so fast that no one happens to be dialing at that time. I would suspect there may be a handful of call failures and maybe they are just not being reported.

Anyway, I would assume this is a reg timer issue or something? All of the phones are configured via the provided provisioning files. Assuming this is the normal operation for the Yealinks it pretty much renders this alert feature useless. It is around a 100 phone installation, so my inbox is getting a workout since I have enabled this!

Just for my own curiosity I turned this on at some other sites that don't use Yealink and I have one or two emails in a week where this happened which seems more reasonable.

 

[lneblett]

is the comparison truly equitable?

BY this I mean you indicated that you were having some kind of issue that caused you to turn on the email notices and this site is over a VPN. Were the other sites VPN? Are the registration periods the same across all test environs? Do they all use the same webserver?
Just curious more so than anything else as I have not tried this at the extension level; only the trunk.

 

[GManNAtl]

Probably a case of too much info. The site that was having issues was experiencing network issues which caused me to turn it on in the first place.

Anyway, to elaborate on the topology, it is basically "hub & spoke" with the PBX in the main office and 7 sites connected via VPN, and a few home users behind NAT.

It is happening for all phones including the ones on the local LAN. Also, it doesn't seem to be VPN related as it will happen with just one or two phones in a VPN connected site at a time. I don't have a good wireshark just yet, but will get one. However, like I said it seems to be happening VERY fast. The emails I receive come in together, meaning I get the unreg and reg back to back in pairs most of the time. Also, I haven't watched it like a hawk, but I don't notice when watching the extension status screen that anything even changes. Other than getting these emails I wouldn't even know there was anything wrong. I just can't imagine this is normal for the Yealink's.

 

[lneblett]

Interesting -

What model Yealink and its and firmware version?

You might find an extension that exhibits this issue and then go into its web interface and look at the registration period and then see if you can correlate that to the interval by which you get the emails for the same extension. These should also be listed in the server activity log as an event 4101. As you indicated, it is seemingly very fast, so it may be a function of how the Yealink registers or it could be a "bug" or "feature" of how 3CX interprets same.

I am intrigued, so I just enabled the email setting on a system with a mixture of Yealink, Grandstream and Panasonic.

 

[lneblett]

Thought I would get back to after a week of running with the email option set to notify on an extension status change -

In my case, there has not been a single instance where I received a message regarding an extension status change that was not truly valid. This site has over 100 phones.

Everyday I got a message about a phone at a pool coming and going, but this is a valid response as the pool has a swim-up bar and the owners install a phone during operational hours and disconnect it and put it away during other hours. This is a Panasonic cordless.

I also had one Yealink report one time, but this was when the extension owner decided to rearrange her office and disconnected the phone.

Other than that, it was all clear and there should have been hundreds if not thousand of emails had they followed the same scenario as you seem to have.

 

[bardissi]

From our perspective phone re-registering is not uncommon.

It can be hard to gain the visibility into network issues using email notification they way you are trying to do so via 3cx alerts.

What you need is a tool that will monitor the WAN stats (latency, ping ms time, average MOSS score, etc) so that you can diagnose where the chink in the armor is.

Also, the VPN could also be a part of the problem. Its possible the VPN tunnel is possible unstable and causing the phone registration packets not to hit the end destination!

That is why we do not rely on VPN to connect a remote 3CX phone to a 3CX server.

The best way to go is to use a Session Border Controller to manage that traffic.

We offer a hosted SBC solution that would eliminate the VPN and connect your remote phones over the WAN.

Less bandwidth being used because you no longer have the VPN tunnel overhead to deal with.

Also, I can recommend some monitoring tools that we use to monitor remote sites for ongoing visibility into issues.

 

[lneblett]

Bardissi -

The post stated "It is happening for all phones including the ones on the local LAN".

 

[bardissi]

When I look at logs of a V12 LAN based 3CX with Yealink T38 its not as active but there are re-registrations occurring on the phones.

 

[lneblett]

Virtually all phones will register and subsequently re-register as their registration period nears expiration. However, while normal and expected, one should not expect there to be a barrage of emails indicating what is otherwise a normal operation. As indicated in my earlier post, I turned on email notifications on status change and only received email notifications relative to those phones that truly missed their registration timeout. I did not receive any emails from phones who simply re-registered.

The implication seems to me to be a timing issue between the phones and the system as the phones are not re-registering prior to the 3CX system thinking the phone is "off-line". However, he indicated that he never noticed a registration change of color when viewing the extension status screen and that the email he received were always grouped such that a registration loss notice was immediately followed by a re-registration notice.

So the question becomes " why does he suffer this issue, regardless of VPN and/or LAN (all suffer), when a rather large system comprised of several different makes of phones which also include the ones he is having the challenge with, doesn't seem to have the issue at all?".

I can only suggest starting a wireshark and letting it run in promiscuous mode and then comparing it against the server logs (they should be reporting the loss and acquisition of registrations) for times and then looking at the data at the impacted time to see if something shows up.

 

[bardissi]

Agreed