resilient phones unable to boot up unless primary ICP is online

[Mitelpassion]

Hi,

Is it possible for a phone in reslient state to reboot and home/register with the secondary ICP. my personal experience that it doesn't.
The reason is after the reboot it doesn't have the secondary ICP IP anymore.

My assumption though is that this should be possible. What am I doing wrong?

Normal resiliency fail over and failback work fine if both Primary and secondary ICP's are 'reacheable'

thanks

 

[kwbMitel]

Whatever provides the DHCP needs to provide both controllers.

e.g. Option 128 = 192.168.1.2;192.168.2.2


*******************************************************
Occam's Razor - All things being equal, the simplest solution is the right one.

 

[slapin]

I configure DHCP options on both controllers pointing to itself only. The range of addresses is divides in order to avoid conflicts. So if in normal mode a phone will grab an IP address from the secondary ICP, then it will download the image, start from the secondary controller and properly configured portable directory will redirect that phone to its home controller regardless of initial connection. If the primary controller is not available, then resilent phone will stay on the secondary until primary will come on-line.

 

[kwbMitel]

Slapin's solution works if both controllers are in the same subnet.

Mine works if they are in separate subnet's.

P.S. For Slapin's solution, I have found that you can configure the same range on both controllers. The controllers won't hand out conflict addresses. with this method, I still hand out both controllers addresses.

*******************************************************
Occam's Razor - All things being equal, the simplest solution is the right one.

 

[slapin]

If controllers are in different networks, then there should be alternative DHCP server or a helper on network switches pointing to a DHCP servers. It's always a good idea not to overlap ranges since in some cases conflict resolution methods may not work reliably with some devices. (I prefer to stay away from even potential problems )

Besides that it's possible to use combined method when configuring both IPs in DHCP options but in differnt order

 

[paterson]

I think what kwbMitel meant was that if both ICPs are on the same subnet AND you have the same DHCP range in both, then neither of the ICPs will hand out conflicting addresses if the addresses belong to resilient Mitel IP phones. This is due to the resiliency setup where both ICPs know the IP address of each RESILIENT phone regardless of which ICP handed out the DHCP address or which ICP the phone is registered to. If the ICP knows that a specific address is used even when not in it's own DHCP Lease list, it will not hand out that address.

I am thinking that there could still be caveats to this setup though. That would be that each IP phone would need to be resilient and that the 3300ICPs are not handing out DHCP to non-Mitel IP Phone devices, such as other PCs.

 

[paterson]

kwbMitel, please correct and elaborate as appropriate.

 

[kwbMitel]

Resiliency is not a factor.

The first time it was an accident that I made duplicate address ranges on controllers on the same subnet. Now I do it on purpose. What I observed is that the leases on both machines reflected ALL of the active addresses regardless of the controller that handed out the address. The one that hands out the address shows the MAC that is assigned. The other shows that address as reserved. Works like a charm.

*******************************************************
Occam's Razor - All things being equal, the simplest solution is the right one.

 

[Mitelpassion]

thanks for the feedback guys.
kwbmitel the reason why overlapping works is because before the Mitel DHCP hands out and IP it does a ping first to see if the addy is being used already or not.

how does one configure both ICP's using option 125? I must admit I've never used this method before but it makes sense.

thanks,

 

[slapin]

Mitelpassion, you are correct. The system is trying to "ping" by doing test ARP resolution. If something is responding it will reserve this address for standard lease period and try to issue another one. The problem that some devices may not respond properly due to bugs, malfunctioning or intentionaly to ARP requests and we have a hard to debug problem... Controllers don't know adresses of resilient phones. Handoff is done using portable directory references because phones save PIN (extension) in flash memory and present it to the controller during registration handshake. If the phone is connecting to the secondary controller first the system will lookup its local database and determine if the MAC address of the phone known and where is the primary controller. If primary controller is not available the secondary one will register phone as resilient and wait until the primary comes on-line. It the phone is not resilient it will present saved PIN and ICP will use it to lookup this extension in its portable directory database and send new connection parameters back to the phone regardless of status (up/down) of the home element.

 

[kwbMitel]

With Slapin's caution in mind, we can still program option 125 to deliver both controller addresses in case of need.

Just enter both addresses in the order you want separated by a semicolon.

*******************************************************
Occam's Razor - All things being equal, the simplest solution is the right one.

 

[Mitelpassion]

I've never tried using options 125 and seperating call_srv IP addys with semi colons.

I assume this is possible for both Mitel controller DHCP and Wincrash ?

again thaks for the input.

E

 

[kwbMitel]

The semi;colon separator is pretty universal in my experience when needing to hand out multiple addresses against 1 DHCP option.



*******************************************************
Occam's Razor - All things being equal, the simplest solution is the right one.