Red & Blue Alarm Trouble-shooting

[VoIPP]

IPO 500V2 8.1

Customer is getting red and blue alarms on their PRI circuit. Phone system has been in place since about June and this just started recently.

Teleco said they had a bad pair and swapped pairs. Still getting alarms. Telco tested for 90 minutes without connecting phone system and say they saw no errors but when plugging in IPO start seeing errors.

What steps do I need to do to trouble-shoot? The cable from the smart-jack is a Cat5 (25ft) not a T1, could that be the problem?

Thanks.

 

[amriddle01]

Red Alarm

Your T1/E1 port will go into red alarm when it cannot maintain synchronization with the remote switch. A red alarm
typically indicates either a physical wiring problem, loss of connectivity, or a framing and/or line-coding mismatch with the
remote switch.

When your T1/E1 port loses sync, it will transmit a yellow alarm to the remote switch to indicate that it's having a problem
receiving signal from the remote switch.
The easy way to remember this is that the R in red stands for "right here" and "receive"... indicating that we're having a
problem right here receiving the signal from the remote switch.

Yellow Alarm

Your T1/E1 port will go into yellow alarm when it receives a signal from the remote switch that the port on that remote
switch is in red alarm. This essentially means that the remote switch is not able to
maintain sync with you, or is not receiving your transmission.
The easy way to remember this is that the Y in yellow stands for "yonder"... indicating that the remote switch (over
yonder) isn't able to see what you're sending.

Blue Alarm

Your T1/E1 port will go into blue alarm when it receives all unframed 1s on all timeslots from the remote switch. This is a
special signal to indicate that the remote switch is having problems with its
upstream connection. dahdi_tool and Asterisk don't correctly indicate a blue alarm at this time. The easy way to
remember this is that streams are blue, so a blue alarm indicates a problem upstream from
the switch you're connected to.

 

[VoIPP]

I don't have a PRI card in a unit to play with. Is there anything I can do onsite to trouble-shoot?

 

[amriddle01]

Not much beyond changing the patch lead to rule that out and taking a spare card. But if the Telco had an issue it's likely to still be their issue, unless they damaged the system equipment in the process. Either that or it's a huge coincidence that the system developed a fault relating to the lines at the exact same time as their equipment did

 

[VoIPP]

The only thing I can think to do is to put a loopback plug on the patch cord and leave it connected to the IPO and see if the IPO alarms.

 

[CarGoSki]

You can test the cabling from the smart jack to the ipo.
Corrosion on one pin will give layer 1 issues manifested as yellow or red alarms(depending on if the corroded pin is one of the rx or tx.)
Bad patch cord.
Crappy house cabling from smart jack to ipo
bad smart card
all other things that point to the provider

post your ISDN layer 1 traces.

 

[smokinjoe2938]

From reading through these threads it seems that cabling is not an issue, however clearly the telco has had some cable pair issues and problems still exist, do not believe them, the problem most likely is still at the circuit provider, have them come on site and test circuit with a t-bird or a firebird t1 tester to prove it is not their issue but I still believe it is their issue.

acss sme acis sme acss cm 5.2.1 acss cm and cmm acss aura messaging.

 

[VoIPP]

telco had a clock issue. Every half hour we were losing the clock for 10 seconds. Avaya tech told me that when that happens enough times that the IPO has to be rebooted.

The customer did experience the need to reboot. The IPO would would come to a point where it would drop all calls after about 4 seconds and rebooting would clear that up for awhile.

 

[smokinjoe2938]

What a shocker a telco issue when they said it was all set on their end, oldest story in the book.

acss sme acis sme acss cm 5.2.1 acss cm and cmm acss aura messaging.