Hello all,

The company I work for recently purchased an Asterisk machine and we ran into some issues today in our test lab. We installed and configured four phones, they are Grandstream 2000's. After initial difficulties we were able to get all the phones to register but then I screwed something up and can't seem to fix it. I was attempting to create 2 accounts for a single phone and gave the second account the same extension as the first. The system obviously did not like this because when the phone rebooted it would not register. I attempted to delete the phone from the system, and though the gui manager no longer shows the phone and its configurations, it now says that their are 5 phones...

The problem phone continually receives it's original IP address from the pbx but will not re-register. The fact that the gui manager show 5 phones instead of four makes me think that the issue may be duplicate IP addresses for what the system thinks are separate phones when there should only be one. I took all network devices through their power cycles from upstream to down thinking the problem could be stupid switches having ARP problems, maybe the switch's port not releasing the MAC address of the phone but I was unsuccessful.

I think my question is this; how do i get the phone to drop it's old IP and pick up a new one? A better question might be 'why the hell won't the pbx allow this phone to register.' I'm pretty sure the system thinks there is a duplicate address given that it shows 5 phones when there are only four but I could be wrong. I tried many things (five hours worth) turning off auto provisioning, turning off dhcp and making a static address, starting the auto provisioner with higher extension numbers to avoid duplication issues...I tried lot's of things but I'm about to throw the damn thing out the window. I hate to tell my company they wasted their money because I'm sure there's something I could do. What in Asterisk deals with registering the phones?

So far the response from the seller is to power off all devices and bring them back up starting with the most upstream device which in this case is a motorola cable modem. While our lab may not consist of very sophisticated equipment, it is this way intentionally as we service a lot small businesses and like to mimic a similar environment. Perhaps a requirement for this box would be smarter devices but I doubt it and that's a crappy solution anyway. Gotta be something...even if this box is a piece of junk I'd like to figure out the reason why.

I know I said a mouthful but hopefully there are some ideas out there. KUMBA!...

Well, sounds like the problem is not Asterisk, but this GUI you are using. Asterisk itself has no GUI. It's a bare text-based telephony server. It's native configuration system is a collection of configuration flat-files.

I could tell you in 60 seconds or less what to do with bare Asterisk, but the inclusion of whatever this GUI is and how it's integrated with Asterisk could add hours to the diagnosis.

So, what is this GUI? Is it FreePBX? Trixbox? Elastix? AsteriskNOW? ???

Beyond that, I'm guessing that the GUI doesn't properly handle/format/display/whatever phone entries in it's database with the same dialplan extension. I am going to guess the answer is something along the lines of going into the back-end database and deleting the duplicate phone entry. But, again, that is just a pretty wide guess.

I wouldn't really recommend doing any of that without more information. You should probably seek out someone who knows your GUI more then someone who knows Asterisk.

Part of the problem I have is finding techs who work and know core Asterisk. There are a ton of people who know a front-end GUI like TrixBox, Elastix, SwitchVox, etc, but there are few people who know how the heart of it all works (asterisk).

Ohh, and also just because I like to inject my own bias here and there, ditch the grandstreams and get a Snom or Polycom. If you are going to invest your company name into something then you should make sure you are using products that will stand up. Grandstreams are a cheap/inexpensive SIP phone. They are not what I would call a quality piece and have a known track record of short service lives before failure. About the only phone they have that is somewhat decent is the GXP2000. Anything less will usually be dead in 6 months or less.

Call thier tech support number

I'm with you on the value of knowing asterisk at it's core. I've spent spent enough time with it to get some soft phones talking to one another at home, but that's the asterisk equivalent of 'Hello World' and no help at all in these situations. I can feel the power of the darkside..i just need some practice...lots and lots of practice. Thanks for the suggestions Kumba, I'll pass it on.

Oh yeah and the GUI is custom but modeled after FreePBX as I understand.

The box doesn't even provide a shell, it's basically an appliance.

What little I have picked up in reading Asterisk threads would lead me to believe that you need to remove your 'custom built' GUI and use a 'reliable' free one.

Well, since I still don't have the name of the GUI you are using I can't help you do anything.

You need to take JohnP's advice and call whoever wrote the GUI to figure it out.

If you want something free and actually useful to use I would recommend looking at Elastix. It uses FreePBX as the configuration GUI and has a lot of provisioning tools for phones and other things. The maintainers of it also offer paid support directly in case you get stuck.

I'm an old digital PBX graybeard, but any time a problem rears it's head with a SIP phone, I delete all traces of the phone from the PBX/server, return the SIP phone to factory default, reboot everything and start over. Works 99% of the time.

The 1 per centers merely increase my consumption of Jamesons. Not always a bad thing.

Apologies for the delayed response.

Kumba you totally hit the nail on the head with the database not being handled properly. A quick look into mysql and deleting the extraneous phone ids solved the issue. The engineer was unaware of the problem and said he'd fix it. I'm pretty linux noobish as it is and know less about sql but it was an easy fix being walked through it.

Now that I have a backdoor I can start to unpack and grok this thing. No small task for my small brain. Hopefully I break the hell out of it so I can fix it again.