[cisco-voip] ATA changes

[Robert Singleton]

I've been troubleshooting faxing issues lately (and that is a whole
'nother thing) and along the way, it came to my attention that somewhere
in one of my two recent upgrades (from 4.0 to 4.1.3, then applying sr4d
to that), there was apparently an upgrade to the phone load for the
ATA-18X. The web access to the old firmware was in the form of
http://ipaddress/dev and was presented as a single page form. The newer
version is more like the web access on the 7900 phones, a title page and
several pages with information and editable parameters. On the face, it
is definitely better, though it does break a couple of my scripts. :)

What I'm asking the list if any of you have experienced two ATA problems
that I only discovered during the last few days.

First, and this is more of an irritant than a problem, but on the main
page, the Phone DN fields don't display the actual DN, but rather the
E.164 address for that line. This was confusing because I was working on
fax machines and most of our fax numbers are ported numbers coming in a
PRI and translated to the DN. The DN conforms to an internal numbering
plan where basically all fax DNs are in the form of 2XXX9YY where XXX is
the branch ID and YY is 00-99. Often I have two or more DIDs pointed to
the same DN. All my reporting and CDR queries want the DN. So anyway,
when I am marching through a bunch of ATAs adjusting parameters at 2AM,
I have enough trouble keeping it straight without being shown the wrong
info for the DN.

The second thing is really a lot worse problem, though it really comes
down to a political issue. The new image seems to change the ethernet
port on the ATA to run 10MB half duplex. In the majority of my
locations, this is no problem because the switch ports are set auto/auto
as seems to be recommended by everyone I've talked to except for the
contractor that maintains our network. They like to lock ports for
telephones to 100MB full duplex. This is done to minimize alarms from
devices that may legitimately renegotiate, such as those unfortunate
enough to not be on POE switches, etc. That's a different argument and I
I can see both sides.

The problem is that I was unaware of the ATA image update (my bad, true)
when something random caused some ATAs to reload. After they came back
up, they no longer worked on any port in the affected switches. Not even
a link light. We spent some days troubleshooting remotely with
non-technical personnel, changed cables, sent replacements, verified
that 79XX phones worked in those ports, etc, before someone thought to
check the setting on the switch. In on instance, I had no paging in
three branches from last Wednesday until late yesterday afternoon when
we discovered the caveat. I have since found 3 or 4 of the 70 or so ATAs
I have out there were in a similar condition, but they just happened to
be in applications where the problem hadn't surfaced yet. Most are on
switches that we have set to auto/auto regardless of what our contractor
would prefer and so negotiated to 10MB half duplex and are working
without issue.

Robert