The feature

Starting with IP Office release 10 Avaya added the ability to connect One-X Portal to a Server Edition solution through a single connection rather than to add every single node manually. That makes administration much easier and you don’t have to worry about forgetting to add new connections within One-X Portal if your customer needs further nodes. But this enhancement made me struggling almost a full day in a none Server Edition environment.

Up to release 9.1 you had to add every single node of a Server Edition Solution as CSTA provider and as DSML provider. Especially if One-X Portal doesn’t run on primary server but is deployed as dedicated application server it is possible to come into trouble if remote nodes are not reachable from that application server. Since release 10.0 you can now have one single connection from One-X Portal to IP Office primary server. Primary server will kind of act like a proxy to link One-X Portal with all other nodes.

This week I had to upgrade an IP500V2 chassis from release 8.1 up to 10.1 and decided to replace the old Windows based Voicemail Pro and One-X Portal – thanks to the new option to virtualize on Hyper-V – with an application server. Not a big deal. Create backups of Voicemail Pro and One-X Portal. Restore Voicemail Pro on the new server. Do the initial setup of One-X Portal and restore the One-X database.

The issue

This time I got an error that the ‘SAP provided login failed’ for the CSTA Provider. No worries… setting a new password for the IP Office security user ‘EnhTcpaService’ and use the same within the One-X Portal CSTA Provider should do the trick. To be sure the new password would be used I restarted the One-X Portal service. Same result…

After searching the configuration options I found the ‘Central CTI link’ option enabled and grayed out. Under that check box there is a description of that option. It tells that it is supported in Server Edition environment and that it only used the link to the primary server to get all the users of the whole solution. It is also described that an IP500 environment will be detected and the option will be disabled.

One-X Portal central CTI link

How would you think a disabled option would look like? In my opinion the check box has to be empty. But no way… It was enabled and grayed out. I looked for options to reset the One-X Portal configuration or to do the initial setup again or delete some config file within Linux without any success and decided to replace the server with a new one.

Long story short… The new server worked well for Voicemail Pro but I had the same issue with One-X Portal. I checked the same setting on another customer’s application server and figured out that it looked the same. Check box enabled and grayed out. But it was working well.

My last chance was to check with System Monitor what happened at the IP500 side. After playing around with some filter settings I saw connections from the older server. Those came from the old R8.1 One-X Portal service on the Windows server. After shutting down the service the new One-X Portal started to work without any problems. It seems that the logins from the old One-X Portal locked the interface on the IP500 so that the new Portal couldn’t connect.

Conclusion

Effectively it was a small mistake with bigger impact that shouldn’t have happened.

Sadfully I had no alarms in System Status Application about wrong logins and I found the description about the not supported central CTI access in IP500 environment. That led me in the wrong direction.

It seems that Avaya’s description that IP500 will be recognized and the central CTI option will be disabled is correct. But the enabled and grayed out check box is confusing. Avaya should uncheck the box and make it grayed out or they should write a better text underneath the box.

I would also like to see alarms in SSA if connections are declined.

Anyway… I learned my lesson and I hope this article helps someone to avoid spending time searching for an issue that doesn’t exist.

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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