BCM50 2.0 configuration lost after power outage. 2

[gm85]

Hey Everyone,

I have a BCM50 2.0 system and have had a couple problems with the system this morning.

We had the system installed about 2 weeks ago. The system is installed behind a UPS, however during the time of the install, I was unable to attach the signaling cable to the BCM.

Last night we had severe power outage, which caused our UPS battery to completely drain and the system to lose power (without being shut down properly because of the absence of the signalling cable).

When the power came back on, I found a lot of our configuration was lost, including:
-All the telephony settings regarding lines, digital sets and IP sets.
-call scheduling, and the callpilot extension number.

However information related to BCM system settings, such as user accounts, passwords, ip addresses, ntp settings, remained intact.
Callpilot information related to voice mailboxes, CCR and the Auto Attendant were also not affected.

I was able to restore the system using a backup I saved via FTP, which was able to restore all information, EXCEPT for the Call Scheduling (used for forwaring calls to voicemail overnight) and the Voicemail Extension number.

I have a couple questions though:
-Is this typical if the system is not shut down gracefully before the power is shut off? (the system is now attached to the UPS signalling cable. I also found you don't need to restart the BCM to detect the UPS as all you need to do is restart the apcupsd service).
-I've been saving backups via FTP to another server. Would backing up to the BCM itself prevent this issue?
-Is there any idea why call scheduling and the voice mail extension number were not restored?

Thanks!

 

[steeef]

i don't know any procedure for bcm50 that shuts down the bcm50 graceful. I always just power it down but never had any issues with that.

 

[gm85]

Yeah with the UPS communication cable, the UPS will actually shut the BCM50 down before the battery runs out.

This was from an APC press release

http://www.apcc.com/solutions/display.cfm?id=00ABC5CE-5056-9170-D330A0AED0F14B5F

"The Intelligent APC UPS interface feature provides battery health alerting, power quality monitoring, and graceful shutdown of the BCM in the event of an extended power outage.

 

[Khosher]

So how would you go about shutting it down manually ?

I too would just pull the plug as I haven't seen any shut down options ?

 

[gm85]

I'm not sure.

But anyways, has anyone had issues with their BCM losing all telephony configuration after a power outage?

 

[acewarlock]

Only if the BFT had the Green Caps

 

[madwok]

None of our 32 BCM50 ever did .
Had about 5 with bad LAN ports - failure right out of the box .

There is no process to gracefully shutdown the BCM50 that I've known . Just unplug the cord according to Nortel engineers !!

 

[teekow]

As usual, never do anything a Nortel engineer says unless you read it in a manual too..... The BCM50 install docs go though the procedure to power down a BCM50. Use the "Reboot" button and pull the power after both lights turn a different color (I believe amber after about 30-45 seconds). Obvious to the most casual observer. Special thanks to Nortel for making a straight forward maintenance procedure make no sense at all.

I haven't seen a BCM50 lose its config only after losing power. Obviously it shouldn't do this.

Hope this helps
Rob

 

[gm85]

Thanks for the info everyone.

I'm going to be performing a controlled shutdown of our UPSs sometime this week (to make sure our other attached servers are communicating with the UPS). At this time, I'll see if the BCM is able to retain its information. I'm hoping what happened was a one-time occurance.