Q: I took over responsibility for the Definity phone system at my company a few weeks ago. Since then I’ve been trying to clean up some of the old programming but managed to make things a bit too secure. I just got a complaint from one of the departments that they can no longer forward calls to their on-call cellphone. When trying to activate the call-forward feature they hear a wave-off tone when dialing the leading 9. What did I do?
A: I applaud your efforts in trying to clean up. There is nothing more frustrating than fumbling through a bunch of outdated programming in a switch when trying to figure out a problem. Here is my guess as to what happened. The documentation isn’t very clear on the subject but a hunt group uses the settings in Class of Service (COS) 1. Unfortunately there isn’t any way to change that, so if you changed COS 1 to restrict call-forward off-net that would explain why they couldn’t forward calls.
If your system is like most I’ve seen, the majority of the phones in the switch use COS 1. If you want to maintain the new security you would need to change all of them to another COS that retains the call-forward off-net restriction. Then you could turn off the restriction in COS 1 to allow the hunt group to forward to the cellphone.
Q: I was tasked with learning about our call accounting system. Supposedly it was collecting data from all five of our Definity systems at one time, but I’ve been here for over a year and just found out about it. All our systems are in the V9.5 to V11 range software-wise. At this point all I know is each of the locations has some kind of pollable data collection device with an IP address that the CAS tries to contact. What I need to find out is how the data gets from the switches to each of those devices.
A: The first thing I always do when there is a report of CA/CDR problems is to run the command “status cdr-link.” This will show the status of both the primary and secondary CDR links. In your case all five systems showed the state of the primary link as up, which indicates the switch thinks the output destination is actually connected and working. Setting up CDR output in the Definity is fairly easy but there are a few different screens to look at depending on how the output is configured. Since your system was working at one time we can start by looking at the main screen that controls it. That would be either display or change system-parameters cdr.
The first things to look at are the fields called Primary Output Endpoint and Secondary Output Endpoint. The options are the extension number of a data module (e.g. 7400B, 8400B), eia, CDR1 or CDR2, or blank if no output is requested. In your case I noticed that two of your systems had eia as the primary output and the other three had CDR1.
Let’s start with the ones set up for eia as they are going to be the easiest to figure out. When the output is set for eia the CDR data will be sent to an RS-232 serial port on the back of the switch labeled either Data Communication Equipment or DCE. All you need do is trace that cable from the back of the switch to the data collection device.
Your other switches were set up to send the output to CDR1, which indicates an IP endpoint. To track this one down the first screen to look at is either display or change ip-services. One of the entries in the leftmost column, labeled Service Type, should be CDR1. Follow that row across until you get to the column labeled Remote Node. Make a note of what is entered in that field.
Next you would either display or change node-names ip. Look for an entry in the leftmost column that matches the name you noted from the ip-services form. Following that row across will show the IP address of the endpoint to which the Definity is sending the CDR data.
It may not be as easy to find an IP address as it is to trace a cable but hopefully it will help a little bit. This is in no way a complete description of how to set up the CDR feature on the Definity. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.
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