5550 console needing to be restarted every morning

[martyn]

Have got a strange one that I can't quite put my finger on.
A MCD 5.0 PR1 system with 2 operator consoles. Every morning when the receptionists come in and start up their PC's they also have to reboot the console keypad.
If you fire up the console software without rebooting the key pad then the software doesn't come on-line, and the first few icons remained ghosted out.
If you reboot the keypad and restart the software then all is fine.

At this stage I haven't collected logs, but will be doing that tomorrow, but just thought I'd raise it in the meantime to see if others had any ideas!

[ralph]

Never heard of that.  I'm wondering, though, if it may have something to do with DHCP expiration.

Ralph

[martyn]

Never heard of that.  I'm wondering, though, if it may have something to do with DHCP expiration.

Ralph

Nup, DHCP lease time is 7 days. All normal phones are fine and don't have to be rebooted.

Tested this morning, and found the following:
The lights are on the lan interface on the keypad. Red light is out on top though. Can ping the keypad.
Fire up the software and it can't connect to the key pad, even though the system is pinging it at the time.
Re-ran the config wizard, still the same though.
Reboot the keypad, wait for red light to go out, fire up the software and all working again.
Shut the PC down, left it for 5 minutes and then started it back up. All working fine straight away, so must be something overnight that is causing it.

Now going to go through the logs that are generated to see if anything can be spotted in there.

Strange happenings!

[v2win]

Are they shutting the pc down or going into hibernation mode?

[martyn]

Are they shutting the pc down or going into hibernation mode?

The PC is shut down overnight.

[martyn]

Never heard of that.  I'm wondering, though, if it may have something to do with DHCP expiration.

Ralph

Whilst I ruled out the DHCP lease time for the keypad I hadn't thought of the DHCP lease time being a problem for the PC. Currently that is set to a small amount of time, which means that the PC has a different address every day. I've now given it a reservation in DHCP, and we shall see how that goes.

As an aside, does anyone actually have any technical documentation about the 5550 keypads? MOL seems to be very light on, and whilst I keep thinking I've got the things figured out a new curly one keeps coming up. I'm after things such as it's boot process, traffic generated during the boot process, and it's registration process. Some of this I can get from a wireshark trace, but it would be good to actually have it in written form to get a solid understanding of the dumb bits of plastic.

[ralph]

There's a tool called Ping Plotter that may be able to help.
It's been a while since I've used it.

If I remember correctly, you can set a ping against the keypad and it will monitor it overnight so you can get an idea of what's happening.

On that thought, is the keypad ping-able in the AM?

Ping Plotter can be found here.

Ralph

[martyn]

On that thought, is the keypad ping-able in the AM?

Yep keypad is ping-able in the morning.

[martyn]

A resolution to this one!

Because the PC was getting a different IP address every day it was the cause of the issue, as the console was expecting to bind with one IP address but getting requests from another. Statically set the IP address of the PC and everything works as it should again.