On Monday we had a call for help from a remote interstate customer that had lost Internet and phones.
They run all soft phones from a Yeastar P550 IP PBX and are highly mobile but fortunately staff were out of the office and the line has an automatic failover to an answering service so no calls were lost.
How to go about diagnosing this one? The site runs a full Ubiquiti stack of USG (router) into a bridged NetComm router, PoE switch and several Wi-Fi access points. All devices were showing as down in the cloud controller confirming a probable Internet fault.
We asked the retailer to do a line test and they said the line looked OK with sync but they asked if we had we changed the router because previously they saw the Ubiquiti but they could now see the NetComm and there was no authentication.
To us it looked like the NetComm had had a wobbly, had dropped out of bridge mode was now trying to do the authentication but had no credentials to do so because the Ubiquiti USG has them.
Attempts to get the staff to troubleshoot with us were futile – they just wanted a tech out to fix it. We have a company in Canberra that we can call on and they had somebody available next day to attend site – about 1 hour of travel north.
The resolution was that the switch had locked up. Once it was power cycled and came back up the network was restored and all devices came back online in the Ubiquiti controller. No changes were needed on the NetComm router. I’m glad the resolution was straightforward but the question is ‘why could we not see the Ubiquiti USG online at least when it is upstream of the switch?’ The advice from the carrier was a bit of a red herring but all available information confirmed the mistaken belief of a router fault.
Just one of the things that keeps life interesting in this game.
ICS Technologies is located in Brisbane, Australia but we have techs around the country we can call on to assist in case of problems – a red herring or not. Contact us if you are in need of assistance.
