8300's periodically "go dead"

[cl8ton]

Please bear with me here, I'm still a bit of a newbie!! Forgive me for thet length of this post.

We have an 8700 installed locally in our coporate office, as well as 3 remote 8300's with LSP enabled. We run VoIP across a frame relay link to these remote sites using Cisco routers with QOS and traffic shaping enabled.
For the past few months, we have been battling identical problems in our remote sites -- several times throughout the day remote users pick up their handsets (digital sets, no ip phones) and do not get dialtone. I have also had several reports where it appears that the phones are dead, with nothing appearing on the caller display. Phones usually come back within a minute or two. Whatever is happening, it goes as far as to cut users off in the middle of conversations. I should mention that the only time the VOIP link is used, is to access an Octel voicemail system located in the corporate office, or to 4 digit dial someone in the corporate office.
We have had Avaya come out and do a network assessment, and have implemented the few changes they recommended. (VLANS and the QOS.) The most recent suggestion made by Avaya is to get the two remote sites off of loop start and onto ground start for their CO trunks; they also suggests temporary installation of C-LAN boards at the remote sites to help weed out problems at any particular site; also, to monitor our frame network closely.
Has anyone experienced this type of problem? Does anyone have any ideas of something we might look at closer? The frustration levels are getting higher.
Thanks

Carla

 

[ph0neguy]

As always you should make sure all of your firware is up to date per

http://support.avaya.com

thats always the best place to start. If you run one of these S8300's in non lsp mode does it work properly, dialtone is ok and calls can go out local co lines too. Only think I can think of is you have a problem common to all S8300's. So I don't believe you have something programmed incorrectly in the S8300. If you do a list trace station on a phone off the media gateway and it gets dial tone where does it show it hooked up to. It should be a tone reciever in the S8300. But the signaling has to go across you're frame so you are subject to delay. Make sure the MGP's IP address and the Clan card and respective ports 1719 and 1720 have ultimate qos and are not ever dropped because if that happens or theres too much jitter or delay you will get a problem like what you're having.

 

[BuckWeet]

Question on AVAYA's recommendations though, if you have S8300's then you have G700 or G350 cabinets, so how are you going to put CLAN's at the remote sites? YOU CAN'T!

 

[cl8ton]

Ph0neguy and BuckWeet, thanks for the replies..

I have done a few list traces, but will do some more for each location, thanks. We did go through all of the firmware updates for all the equipment per Avaya. The one other thing I didn't mention, is we are currently on CM 1.31. We're considering upgrading to 2.1, but I don't think that's going to make any difference with our current issues.

As for putting a C-LAN at the remotes, YES each site has its own G700. BuckWeet - can you elaborate on why its not possible to put CLANS on 8300's with a G700 cabinet?

 

[BuckWeet]

Because the G700 isn't a standard carrier.. its a rack mount carrier that uses media modules, not standard circuit packs.

 

[cl8ton]

BuckWeet-

I went back and re-read email from they Avaya folks to see what their intentions are for the CLANS. Looks like I misread - instead of putting one at each remote, they want to install individual CLAN boards for remote locations at our central 8700 location (which is integrated with a Definity G3V11).
I guess this can potentially weed out problems occuring at one location, but wouldn't this still run into potential issues with signaling across the frame?
Anyway, thanks for clarifying that! I totally overlooked that.

 

[Jono73]

According to Avaya's own documentation, as long as you make appropriate Net Regions for your sites and define your Net Map correctly, you don't need to specify specific CLANs to specific sites. You would just need to make sure that you have adequate CLAN resources period...

No?