Networking

3Com on a VPN

Due to necessity we have a remote user on a VPN tunnel to run her laptop and phone. While I hear many of you groan (I did at the time too) there are just no way out of doing it at times. Recently she called into the office, via Cell, to tell us that her phone was not working. I logged into her Sonicwall and discovered I can ping the phone and the phone system.  I then logged in to the phone system and it shows her as IP unknown with the correct IP listed.  It also shows all of the VPN tunnels as up. I then sent her the request via Email to do the following: 

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Can you pull the little black cord from the phone wait 1 min. and then plug it back in for me?

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OK did that now I have a dial tone.  I tried that yesterday but it did not work so glad this time it did.

Thanks for your help!

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No problem. Unfortunately you may have problems now and again as the phone is going through a VPN. Usually the best fix is as follows.

Open a Command window (Start – run –Type CMD – enter)

A black window should appear. In that black window type Ping 192.168.40.10.

You should get a response back with times.

If you get a “Timed Out” comment give the office a call or wait 10 min and try again.

If it pings back properly; please pull the power from the phone for one min then plug it back in.

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It seems these kinds of procedures are necessary for older proprietary VOIP systems. The newer SIP based solutions (Asterisk/Switchvox/Trixbox) seem to have an easier time of it as does the Altigen VOIP as it seems to have been designed with this in mind. In time as the bandwidth and quality on the internet improves I think many companies will not even have a phone system as it will all be “hosted” elsewhere and the phones will just connect via the net. Until that day if you have remote users take a hard look at Altigen and Astrisk to control all of just your remote users or deal with the randomness of the VPN tunnel.

Cheers!

The Journey begins…

Let’s take a digital walk, shall we? There will be many different things to see and learn. I will be your eccentric guide. My name is Jason, and as I seem to know what I am doing at times that puts me in charge, Well, at least until they can find someone better and cheaper (I know you’re out there.) to replace me. I will wander around the networking issues of my day, but, do not be surprised if we stumble across Server, VOIP, and other miscellaneous solutions on the way. So get your traveling and thinking caps screwed on tight and let’s head out into the digital universe. I almost forgot, as we are on a trip, in the words of Douglas Adams, Don’t Panic!, and don’t forget your towel.

Well I fought this for a while but decided to was time to get my thoughts down and spread them out to humanity, whoever that is. I see many of the other bloggers spend their first blog writing about themselves. So here goes. I am awesome, with a strong chance of strange. That’s about all there is to say on that. Now, seeing as this is a networking technical blog I will have to sooner or later begin using words like router, pipe, and bandwidth. Until then I think this will be a fairly informal blog until I hit the next few paragraphs. So, are you still with me and not lost yet?

Ok, here is the tech stuff. Oddly enough most of what I do is network related. This just happened to start on a point where I was not fixing or installing a network and was pulled (kicking and screaming) into an exchange issue. So as odd as this may be the first BLOG on a networking BLOG is about exchange. Don’t worry the next one will be about HP wireless solutions.

I was called to a customer who was not able to send or receive mail. Now this may not seem strange at first, but, all of the outlook clients and OWA were connecting and appeared to be working. The difference was when you sent mail it went into Drafts on OWA and Outbox in Outlook. Quickly I called in for backup and my exchange SWAT team consisted of two coworkers. Both were masters at their trade they worked, feverishly poking and prodding the system until the decided that Yep, it was broke. The queue seemed to be dead in the water. So, I summoned up the courage to call our friends at Microsoft. With a bit of work we got over the language barrier and had him walk another co-worker and myself though some steps. After sacrificing at the altar of tech support pain, here is what was done to fix the silly thing. Shut down transport services and delete the queue folder. Restart transport services and allow it to rebuild the folder. After taking a moment to make sure our net admin user has full access, it took off like a rocket. Mail was once again flowing on the customer’s network. (I bet you thought I forgot about the networking part didn’t you.) We watched it for a while. Got bored dubbed it fixed and announced to the customer “We fixed it!” To which they quickly replied “Why did this happen?” At which time I confidently looked the customer in the eye and said “I don’t know”. Oddly enough this did not seem to faze or even bother the customer. I guess they just trust us to keep it going. Good customers are like that.

So, here we are at the end of a long first entry on “networking”. I sure learned a lot. I don’t know if you did, but as this is my BLOG, I suppose it is all about me. Well that’s it until next time. See you then.

Jason