[asterisk-users] "No Reply to Our Critical Packet" SIP Calls Dropped in Voicemail

[Lincoln King-Cliby]

Thanks to everyone who has replied so far; to answer a few of the follow up questions that have been posed:

Dave - 
> Which firmware load? We had all kinds of trouble with 8.4.x, after being 
> stable for a few months on 8.3.x. Going back to 8.3.x made all of the 
> weirdness disappear. While we're on the Cisco note, I have  script to 
> remotely reboot the SIP firmware load Ciscos and to provision the phones
> based on active directory if you're interested... back on topic:

Hmm... very interesting with regard to the script. For firmware I've tried everything from 8.3.5 up to 8.4.2 with no concrete change (there was one version of 8.3.x that "seemed" to be a little worse, but with how hit or miss it is who knows what reality was) 

The other thing that's been driving me crazy is we have an Asterisk Appliance in one of our remote offices, and while the Appliance is a PITA to admin, neither of the users over there have reported any issues with any of the FW images I've pushed out.

> Have you run a packet cap on a mirror of the switchport the phone this is 
> happening on is connected to? Anything strange? What's happening on the 
> switch backplane (network backbone) at large when you notice the problems? > Major transfers/lots of traffic? Anything else running on the * server?

I'll need to set something up to do a packet cap; the network itself is relatively quiet, and I've been able to reproduce the issue after hours so user-generated traffic isn't in play. The * server also hosts Flash Operator Panel and Zaptel (4 FXO lines) but that's it.

There are only 5.5 FTEs and 7 sets in this office so I can't imagine that we're putting that much stress on the box. 

Alex - 
> Sounds like there's some sort of firewall in place or something else that
> is preventing an ACK from being received in response to the 200 OK. 
> Notice that the 200 OK keeps being retransmitted.

Nope, Asterisk box and phones are on the same subnet and VLAN with no routing or firewalling between the two. In fact, the phone that experiences the issue most frequently is connected to the same physical switch as the Asterisk box. 

Steve- 
> I have a customer with the same complaint and I am trying to figure it out 
> as well.  I have not caught the debug action yet though.
> 
> First, are you using FreePBX?  Second, are you using the "announce" 
> feature.

No to the FreePBX question... Just plain ole regular Asterisk 1.4.22 built from source running on Ubuntu. Not sure how to answer the "announce" question -- when I searched voicemail.conf nothing was found. 

Thanks again!

Lincoln