Strange CICS trouble! 1

[Crowtalks]

I have a weird trouble that appears to only happen in our area invoving CICS 6.0 and 6.1 software. All of these systems have battery backups, surge strips and line protectors. Weather doesn't appear to be a factor.
On different occassions, a customer will call in saying they can't dial out but can receive calls. The first time this happened a year and a half ago, we thought it had a bad trunk cartridge, replaced it and the trouble was fixed. a couple of months later, it happened again to the same customer, we looked at the system and saw where it had reverted to pulse dial on all the lines. We reset the dial to tone and you could dial out. Shortly thereafter, it happened to different customer. This time we powered the system down and powered it back up and it reset to tone. It has happened to half a dozen different customers since then and recycling the power solves it. After checking with our main system engineer for the Eastern Region of my company, it appears this only happens in one city within our company - mine.
Has anyone else experienced this?

 

[rconn]

I had a customer recently who could not dial out from one set for a couple of days. Trouble cleared as I arrived and I did not experience the problem. The CICS (6.1 w CP100) has three lines with appearances on all sets. They could receive calls OK but not dial out from any of the lines from that set.

I rebooted the system just for fun and the problem has not returned.

One for the notebook,

Rob

 

[MarvO1]

Do you have any disgruntled ex-employees?
Seems pretty strange, like someone is messin' around in your systems.

MarvO said it

 

[Crowtalks]

That's a good one....No, no disgruntled ex-employee.
We are an ILEC telephone company. This trouble has happened at 2 manufacturing companies, 1 office, 1 school and a funeral home. These businesses are located in three different communities. Now, the customers either just call and we tell them to power the system down, or they power the system down themselves and tell us about it later.

 

[XetaTech]

That's a pretty wild one......heck, I think all lines default to tone off the bat. Do all of these systems have IRAD's enabled?

 

[Crowtalks]

No. We disabled the IRAD from answering any lines. It is still in the system, of course but can't be accessed remotely.
Thinking about it, you are correct about the CICS default being tone.

 

[bkrike]

Are you providing these customners with a T-1 & channelbank for the dialtone?

 

[Crowtalks]

No, it's just analog lines. I received a response from another forum with the tech stating he had the same trouble with three of his CICS 6.1 systems. He loaded older software, and then upgraded back to 6.1 and apparently his went away....

 

[Crowtalks]

I have an update on this issue...(I guess I'm getting senile in my old age)...I was looking back at my notes and forgot to include one important clue as to the cause of this failure.
Using a digit grabber on a system that had this failure within a fortnight of installation revealed that the system had lost the ability to dial the digit two. Most of our NXXs in the affected areas have the digit two in them, therefore causing almost all calls to fail locally.

 

[nortelnorstar]

If a system reverts to pulse dialing (it shouldn't)... it will still be able to dial out as every CO at least in N/A still recognizes pulse dialing.

Marv

http://www.telemarv.ca

 

[Crowtalks]

You are right of course. When I first posted the trouble, I was posting from memory about events that first stated 15 months ago. Apparently, my memory isn't so good, as is evident in my update post. Referring to my notes, instead of memory, The first time we saw this at an Elementary School, we had to set the system to pulse dial to allow them to dial out until we could get a replacment trunk cartridge (which subsequently turned out to be good). That's where pulse dial came into play. Sorry for the errors.

 

[achuchman]

I had the same issue with my CICS 6.1 where the CLID card would not dial "1" - Any time a user pressed "1", it would just be 1/2 of the DTMF tone.

A quick reboot on the system and it has yet to come back. I don't know if it is an issue with the CLID cards or if there was something with the lines that caused the card to "funk up".

 

[INQUIRY]

I have just ran into something similar.

In normal operation, when one FIRST picks up the phone do they have 1) no sound, 2) a dial tone or 3) another tone?

Did this change in anyway once the problem cropped up?

If they picked up the phone, and it had no sound, could they still dial a "9" or key an outside line?

Thanks, I would appreciate some info.

PS: Was this in Florida? The Compact system?

 

[Crowtalks]

They hear dial tone when they pick up if you have prime line set. In my experience, if you are working across a PRI once you dial your destination code, you do not get another dialtone, you just continue dialing your external digits. It was a CICS each time, but it is in TN.