Neax 64 still acting up. 1

[imeldesign]

I have a Neax 64 Voicemail on my NEC 2000 IPS. It was one of the first ones that had a Win2K Dell box with a slave beige box attached through SCSI. The beige box has two 4 port PCI cards in it.
About three weeks ago I posted that port 7 had stopped working and got the info on how to turn it off for the time being until I could do a restart. A week ago yesterday the who Voicemail system stopped working. All 8 ports just rang. I rebooted twice and it came back up.
Yesterday morning it did it again. After several reboots it came back up.
Now I was becoming slightly paranoid. I went ahead and placed a service call to my vendor. The tech came about three and immediately called NEC. In the meantime he asked if I could connect it so NEC could remote in. I did my thing (I am also the network admin) to allow them through our firewall. In the middle of doing that the video on the dell when down. The box was still running but to get video back I had to reboot. The VM system never went down due to the dell so now my paranoia level is rising.
Finally, the NEC VM guy tells us to take the system down and remove the PCI cards from the beige slave and insert them into the dell and we were going to reconfigure the entire system to work only out of the dell.
I was skeptical and the tech was just as surprised. He is a phone guy and not a computer tech. I suggested we do it Monday morning instead as my receptionist was abou the leave and the autoattendant was set to kick in. That would leave my hours on monday to work on the problem.
Does this solution sound right? I would like some opinions from the experts here.

 

[grh959]

I am surprised you are using an expansion cabinet with only 2 dialogic boards.

The dialogic boards can be installed in the Dell no problem. It should not be too difficult.

Your vendor's tech is able to work with NEC / Active Voice directly so you should be in great shape.

Gary

http://www.gcti.com/contact.asp

 

[imeldesign]

Thanks, that is good to know. I'll do a good backup and then dig in. Another question though. I am all about redundancy. I have another dell (slightly newer and running xp) Can it serve as a backup if there is indeed a problem with the Dell in the phone closet (the video issue). I could swap hard drives if need be. After monday I will know how to configure the dialogic cards.
We are a church and we replace an 8 port antiquated system with another 8 port VM system. Only rarely do we use them all. Most pastors forward calls to their cells.

thanks again have a star
melanie

 

[grh959]

You would need to read specs for the voice mail to see if the Dell will work for you. I do know that you need to run win2000 server or win 2003 server depending on the release of voicemail you have. Check to see what kind of security dongle you have, either usb or Parallel port. Also make sure you have the right PCI slots. some have 5 volt others use 3.3 volt.

Gary

http://www.gcti.com/contact.asp

 

[imeldesign]

Thanks. I can load the Dell with either server software if need be. I would like to have a spare set up just in case. The security dongle is parallel. The replacement was bought around the same time as the phone system. I will compare and contrast tomorrow by pulling the folders on both.
Thanks for your help.

 

[imeldesign]

Well, came in Monday morning at at 8:30am Voice mail died again. I left it for dead until the tech arrived. The dell refused to boot never making it to post. I concluded it was the motherboard and since it was still under warranty I had next day replacement from New Orleans. I called the techs to let them know when the motherboard was installed. By the time they got there I had voicemail back up and running with no problems. So far, it has worked just fine the remainder of the week.

thanks for all the help. I decided to leave the dialogic cards in the slave until we decide if the highschool will join our voicemail system via remote pim or buy their own Avaya system.
If so, then I will add more voicemail ports and the slave will come in handy.

 

[Javamahn]

I would highly recommend you do a full ghost of the hardrive in case the drive dies as well do a daily backup to save all the OGM and settings. Make sure you have all the disks and the license floppies. I am about to spend $1800.00 on labor plus another $375.00 for the reissue of the license key. All this took 3 days. Quite the pain. I still have issues with the database and an open ticket with my vendor. Ounce of prevention.......

 

[imeldesign]

I am up and running. The ghost is a good idea. I may do that in the next couple of week.