Getting Mitel 69xx Phones connected to MiVoice Business

'I don't know why I haven't recorded this sooner. I have to go looking for it in various forums every time I touch one of these systems (which is rare I get a new one).

Make sure your PBX has option 125 setup correctly to issue DHCP to the phones. Depending on the system this may be in ESM, it may be in MSL, it may be on a Border Gateway or other Mitel server or it may be on your network DHCP server.

There are then two ways to setup the PBX, either for the PBX to automatically offer extension numbers to new phones or to manually assign them. Due to the type of work I get I am usually manually assigning them, so pop the mac address in the extensions settings.

When the phone is plugged in it will request DHCP, be put in touch with the PBX, pull its config and new software version, reboot and come to life....  probably.

OR it may go through the bootup and not find the PBX and sit there asking if it should upgrade from the internet. Thats what my last one did, so I let it upgrade. Then it rebooted and connected to the PBX, did another reboot and another upgrade before failing to work. It appeared the previous engineer had not setup vlans correctly in the DHCP offer.  That meant a manual intervention.

69xx range have a default phone password of 73738.  This spells RESET on the keypad. When you first boot them up wait until the loading screen is past 20% and you can press the settings button. You can use this method if you want to statically assign the phone.

Ptress Settings

Then Advanced soft key

You can then fill in the options for the IP Address, DNS and call server information.  There is a 123/abc button to switch from digits to letters. When entering ip addresses there is a "." dot on a softkey.

If you come to a phone that is already installed and the password is not the default this is because the PBX gives it a new password and can lock the phone once its installed.  In the Mitel ESM check the SYSTEM SECURITY MANAGEMENT - PHONE ADMIN PASSWORD.

The same password is in use for the Web UI.  The webUI may be turned off, but it can be enabled from the PBX's maintenance commands 

pd send <extension> enable_web

pd send <extension> disable_web

The WebUI is particularly useful for seeing what the phone screen looks like as users can be poor at describing faults. This one lets you grab a view of the phone screen. You also have trace capability, not so useful in MINET mode but useful for tracing SIP calls.

John Rogers

Ones and Zeros

+44 (0)116 303 3714

www.oneszeros.biz

Mitel 69xx programable keys

 12 years ago I put a post on this blog detailing how the keys were numbered on the 53xx range of IP Phones. I usually record these things in case I forget myself and maybe I help someone else along the way.

Recently putting 6930 phones on a Mitel MiVoice Business I found these don't follow the same pattern. The programing interface of the PBX has no picture of the phone with the buttons numbered so you have to figure it out from the thousands of pages of documentation.  These phones make much more sense numbering from top to bottom with the left column first.

6930

1            7

2            8

3            9

4            10     

5            11

6            12

All the best

John Rogers

www.oneszeros.biz

Ipecs 1000i behaviour. Indications of network problems.

Recent support tickets have caused me to look a little more into how these LG phones work. You may assume they are SIP phones but they are not. It’s almost as though LG took a digital phone and just made it run on IP.

SIP is a very feature poor protocol, so SIP phones tend to contain a lot of features operated by the phone itself. There is very little communication back to the central server. You dial digits on the phone and then press send and at that point a message is sent to the server.

These LG phones depend on constant contact with the host PBX. If the internet connection is not present then pressing any key on the phone does not work. The phone must send every single key press to the PBX and receive an acknowledgment back before it updates the display. Whilst a SIP phones can tolerate minor internet outages when they are idle and will still let you dial a number, even if waiting for a few seconds for the connection to return, the IPecs phones have no tolerance at all. If the network connection is out for a second, you can’t get any key to respond in that second.

The upshot of this is that if your customer calls and says the buttons on the phones are not responding, don’t assume a problem with the phone. It’s more likely to be a network issue. Congested networks where UDP packets get lost also display the same behaviour.

When I tested I also found that after about 5 minutes with no internet connection the phone did a reboot. If the connection was down during the reboot, the phone does not come up. The internet has to be on during boot up for the connection to be restored.

John Rogers

HTTPS://oneszeros.biz

IPECS 1000i Phone Range Manual Setup

From an idle menu you can get into the phone to change IP settings etc.

For instance to change a VLAN setting

Press the Menu Button

Press 8 – Keyset information

Press 0 – Network Settings

Enter password 147*

Press 1 - Profile

 

Profile number 1 will be highlighted – Press OK

Press 1 - Network Settings

Press 5 - VLAN settings

Press 2 - VLAN ID (LAN)

If you explore these menus will will find all the settings you need.

IPecs 1000i range phone provisioning

 I have found that from time to time phones connected to IPecs cloud systems will fail to connect. They sit there at a screen saying No Ack and giving you a range of options.

Usually forcing global provisioning again gets them working.

On the screen it boots to press *  for the [SET] option

It asks for a password – enter 147*

Select Option3 – Default

It asks, Default all profiles, are you sure?

Select YES

Press the BACK button

Reboot Now = YES

Shortly into the reboot the words “Global Provisioning” will display . Hit the Yes button

Hopefully this will help get someone back up and running.

LetsEncrypt failure on Draytek Routers

 We like to use Draytek Routers on our installs as they are easy to configure and tend to be reliable.

As with all things these days https secure connections have been enforced by Chrome and the browser world. This means the routers have to be accessed on https.  This then complicates things as you then need a valid ssl certificate.

Draytek have built in a LetsEncrypt client in their routers, so we use DynDDNS and LetsEncrypt in order to give the router a certificate.  To obscure things further we changed the ssl port away from 443.

All this worked fine until LetsEncrypt changed things. Ou certificates would not renew. It used to be that LetsEncrypt renewd on port 80, but to get things working again we had to change the secure  port back to 443. Suddenly we could renew the cert.

Keep that in mind. To use a Draytek with LetsEncrypt you now need ssl on port 443!

John Rogers

www.oneszeros.biz

FreePBX paging timeout

 We had an issue this week with paging on FreePBX. The customer had a user who made a page to a group of handsets but did not hangup his extension properly. This meant that all the other extensions were locked busy for quite some time. 

The customer asked if we could set a maximum page length. We had a look and the GUI doesn't allow for it. That meant we would need to find a way to modify the config files.

Any config done in the GUI is written into etc/asterisk/extensions_additional.conf. Any config FreePBX writes into here can be overwritten in etc/asterisk/extensions_override_freepbx.conf.

I used WinSCP to get into the FreePBX file system and opened extensions _additional.conf. I dod a search for the page group number which was 2800. This took me to a context called [ext-paging] and below it [app-pagegroups]. I copied the two sections and pasted them into notepad so that I had got an original copy of the config.

Then I used WinSCP to open extensions_override_freepbx.conf and I pasted in the [app-pagegroups] section. It looked like this

[app-pagegroups]
include => app-pagegroups-custom
exten => 2800,1,Macro(user-callerid,)
exten => 2800,n,Set(_PAGEGROUP=2800)
exten => 2800,n(busy-check),GotoIf($[${TRYLOCK(apppagegroups2800)}]?:busy)
exten => 2800,n(devstate),Set(DEVICE_STATE(Custom:PAGE2800)=INUSE)
exten => 2800,n,Gosub(app-paging,ssetup,1())
exten => 2800,n,Set(PAGEMODE=PAGE)
exten => 2800,n,Set(PAGE_MEMBERS=1050-1499)
exten => 2800,n,Set(PAGE_CONF_OPTS=)
exten => 2800,n,Set(ANNOUNCEMENT=beep)
exten => 2800,n(agi),AGI(page.agi)
exten => 2800,n,Set(CONFBRIDGE(user,template)=page_user_duplex)
exten => 2800,n,Set(CONFBRIDGE(user,admin)=yes)
exten => 2800,n,Set(CONFBRIDGE(user,marked)=yes)
exten => 2800,n,Answer
exten => 2800,n(page),ConfBridge(${PAGE_CONF},,,admin_menu)
exten => 2800,n,Hangup
exten => 2800,n(busy),Set(PAGE${PAGEGROUP}BUSY=TRUE)
exten => 2800,n(play-busy),Busy(3)
exten => 2800,n(busy-hang),Goto(app-pagegroups,h,1)
exten => h,1,ExecIf($[${ISNULL(${PAGE${PAGEGROUP}BUSY})}]?Set(DEVICE_STATE(Custom:PAGE${PAGEGROUP})=NOT_INUSE))
;--== end of [app-pagegroups] ==--;

Then I just needed to add a timeout. About line 7 where all the Set statements start I added 

exten => 2800,n,Set(TIMEOUT(absolute)=30)

I then saved the file and issued a fwconsole reload to the terminal of FreePBX to get the config read in.

Now a page will cause the channel to be opened, but if it's not hung up then it will finish and hang up at 30 seconds.

The problem with this approach is if  I want to change the group I can't do it in the GUI anymore. I have noted that in the description of the page group, but if anyone can explain a better approach then I would be happy to hear it.

John Rogers

Ones and Zeros

www.oneszeros.biz