Category Archives: IP Office

Bintec – DHCP Option 242 for Avaya IP phones

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bintec elmeg offers several routers that offer a good feature set (including the more and more important IPv6 and DSLite) for a good price. Those routers can be used for example to build a VPN infrastructure, if you have to connect a central site with several branch offices.

For the central site bintec elmeg offers RXL series routers. For the branch offices the cheapest option is a RS123 router that can connect through ethernet connection or by using the inbuilt SFP port. If there is a DSL line in place, the better option is RS353 or be.IP Plus with it‘s inbuilt PBX. It comes with four analogue interfaces to connect analogue phones or fax devices. No need to buy an extra ATA.

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IP Office WebLM – Host ID missing

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This is a follow up post to this one: https://blog.fwilke.com/avaya-sbc-weblm-not-working/

Update: I removed the hint that the locale can be changed back to “de_DE.UTF-8” because I got the information that the host ID is generated during boot of the server. So it is probably not the best idea to use a locale different to “en_US.UTF-8”.

Update 2: I added the link to the official solution document provided by Avaya.

The issue

As described in the linked article we came over an issue that after upgrading IP Office Server Edition from earlier releases to 11.0 the WebLM stops doing it’s job. It starts well but is not able anymore to pull the MAC address and to generate the host ID.

This leads into the situation that the WebLM properties page shows exactly nothing:

WebLM Host ID missing
Missing Host ID
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Avaya SBC WebLM not working

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After about six month of absence from Avaya I recently started to do some support again. My first job was to update a solution of two IP Office IP500 chassis together with two application servers to release 11.0 and the SBC used to connect mobile workers and a new SIP trunk to the latest 7.2 version.

From IP Office Server Edition I heard about issues with the WebLM delivered in release 11 not showing the server properties page. Without the WebLM’s Host-ID it is not possible to generate valid licenses and so IP Office itself will not work. Continue reading →

Updated: Get IP Office extension list

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Hey all together.

Some times ago I published a small script that pulls all the users and groups from IP Office and presents them as a sorted HTML file. I had issues to correctly display German umlauts (ä, ö, ü) in the HTML document and thought it was an issue that the script didn’t correctly convert those characters in HTML code (ä for example).

I found out that the real issue was that the provided data from IP Office came as UTF8 but PowerShell tries to treat that as local format. We can tell PowerShell to treat the data as UTF8 while reading. Continue reading →

IP Office certificate expired

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Happy new year all together!

With the end of the year 2017 the self signed certificates of many IP Office PBXs expired. Compare my last post from July 2017. Hopefully you were able to renew the certificates of all your systems in the meantime.

If not you will get a warning if you try to login the next time.

Certificate Expired Warning

You will get this warning, if you connect to an IP Office that uses an expired certificate.

In this case it is now the time to react. To get access to the IP Office security settings you have to adjust the IP Office Manager preferences. You have to allow secure access without any certificate checks:

Manager Preferences Menu

This images shows how to disable certificate checks in IP Office Manager preferences

Now you are able to login into security settings and to issue a new certificate.

Hope that helps…

If you need further help with IP Office you can contact me through my main website: https://www.fwilke.com/home

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2 seconds silence with IP Office and 9608G

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Recently after upgrading IP Office to release 10.1 we got calls from different customers who told us that they have about two seconds of silence at the beginning of a call. After researching with one of our customers we figured out that only 9608G phones are affected while other models (9611G, 9641GS) has no problems. In our tests showed that only outbound calls are affected and only calls with direct media (no VCM calls and no RTP relay calls) are affected.

The phone were running different firmware versions and we did an upgrade to 6.6401 as it is the latest firmware that ships with IP Office 10.1. But that didn’t help. Due to the fact that 9611 phones that run the same firmware have no issues we thought of a bad series of hardware. Continue reading →

IP Office SCN fallback

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IP Office is very strong in building a network of multiple systems that feels like a single PBX for the end user. Users can call each other between sites as if they are local. You can build hunt groups with members from different sites and users can have remote users on their phone’s buttons and many more. Technically you just have to build a SCN (Small Community Network) connection between the systems and you are done. The systems exchange all relevant data of the remote systems (like users, hunt groups) and know the best way to reach a remote user.

The challenge

Most times each site has it’s own PSTN connection but internal calls are handled through the SCN connection. But what happens if the connection between sites is lost? That can happen easily if the VPN fails.

Even if it is not officially documented, Avaya built in a fallback mechanism that can help you to manage such situations. There you can define what should be dialed by IPO over PSTN to reach a user if the SCN trunk is down. Continue reading →

Get IP Office extension list

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Those days a customer asked me to create a limited access to IPO for human ressources department to check for used and free extensions. Every time new staff is hired HR decides what extension the new user will get.

The challenge

The challenge was to find a way to create a security user with that restricted and read read only access. Continue reading →

IP Office: Block calls from specific CLI

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The challenge

Did you ever had the case that you get spam calls from a specific CLI? Or do you want to define a special target for calls from a single country or company?
Even if it is good documented and pretty easy many techs and many more costumers don’t know that this is possible. And to be honest I worked a long time with IP Office before I got the hint how to accomplish that. Continue reading →

Use case: IP Office MADN

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With the new IP Office release 10.1 Avaya added a new feature called ‘Multiple Appearance Directory Number’ or short ‘MADN’ to address some customer requests. While there had been the need to be reachable under more than one single number you had to find workarounds to manage that.

The challenge

You had the opportunity to place one (ore more) cheap digital or IP phone in the data center and create bridged appearance keys for that phone. It was also possible to create a hunt group for the additional numbers. The hunt group solution had some disadvantages. Enabling call forwarding or DND (do not disturb) disabled the user’s membership within the group and the user wasn’t reachable anymore. The only way a user could be reached anyway was to dial a short code using the function ‘Dial extension by number’. That works as long as the user doesn’t use hot desking because the function does not call the logged in user but the phone itself.

So we want to be able to call a user through an extra number even if his phone is forwarded or he is in a call. I had a use case where an alarm server had to call the user to play an important voice message in case of a technical issue or in different alarm scenarios like fire or violence. It is important that the alarm server is able to call the user even if his phone is not available for any reason. Continue reading →