[asterisk-users] Trouble with Polycom phones

[JR Richardson]

> I have been running into a few issues with Asterisk/polycom and I am
> running out of ideas. This problem has been ongoing for the last couple
> of weeks. I will try to be as detailed as I can, but I might leave out a
> few details. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Our setup: Asterisk 1.2.22, Fedora 4. Co-located to our PRI providers
> facility. Comes to us via a DS3 to our other co-lo, then is sent via
> wireless to our office. We also have another office in another state but
> the connection is pretty much identical (they may have different
> wireless equipment) except the path it takes.
>
> About 3 weeks ago, our phones started to reboot randomly. Sometimes
> within 5 minutes, and sometimes up to an hour, but they were pretty
> consistent, and it didn't matter if the agent was on the phone or not.
> Asterisk would only tell me that the phones were not reachable, which
> clearly was the case since it was rebooting. At the time, they were
> running I think SIP version 1.6.6. However, the odd factor to that, was
> the office in the other state was not having this problem (running
> 1.6.6) and my phone and my supervisors (which we were testing SIP 2.2.2).
>
> After having our phone company test the DS3, there were some errors
> found, and correct and that solved the problem for a few days. Which of
> course, it started to happen again. However, this time there were no
> errors on the DS3, and again the same problems were occurring, but my
> phone, my supervisors, and the other states were fine. So I decided to
> upgrade all of the phones to version 2.2.2. So that at least solved the
> reboot problem, but I ran into another problem.
>
> Now, the phones lose their registration with Asterisk. My bosses phone
> does it every time he receives a voicemail. Most people can go a few
> hours without having to restart, but then sooner or later, it loses its
> registration. From what I can tell, there are no errors in Asterisk, no
> errors in the logs from the phones booting. I can even ping the phones
> from the asterisk box when this happens, but they just won't re-reg with
> the system. Now my phone has been up almost 3 days now, but other phones
> are still having this problem. Also the phones in the other state are
> not having this problem AND are still on 1.6.6.
>
> Anyone have any suggestions on something to look at, test, try, etc? I'm
> completely stumped.

Here are some things to check from my experience:

1. The polycom phones are a bit sensitive to low power, more so on the
older 301/501/601 models.  Say you have refrigerator plugged into the
same power ckts supplying power to several phones, when the
refrigerator compressor kicks on (randomly), it draws down the voltage
on the line, the phones reboot.  So, if several phones reset at the
same time, look at power, new equipment installed sucking down power,
check the voltage coming in from the street, maybe you are getting
brown-outs from the power company and don't realize it.  Summer time
is a huge draw on the power grid.

2. Network congestion combined with poor phone performance, mostly on
the older models 301/501/601, will cause the phones to randomly drop
off from the PBX.  Sniff the network and ensure you don't have a
broadcast storm or high network congestion, like pc's with viruses,
when the phones drop off. If the phones become unreachable, then
reachable within 10 seconds (look in the asterisk message log) then
this points to network congestion.  Ensure the sip users are set to
qualify=yes (2000ms).

3. Poor switch performance, switch going bad, not responding in a
timely manner forwarding packets.  You can run an extended ping
through the switch, pings are low priority so if the sip packets are
latent, you will definitely see latent ping times as well.

Good Luck,

JR
---------------------
JR Richardson
Engineering for the Masses