Voicemail not picking up

[swilson]

We have a couple users that when you hit their voicemail it the caller continues to hear ringing.  The caller is actually getting into their voicemail and has no idea they are leaving a message(which can lead to some pretty interesting voicemails).   This doesn't happen every time and I have called voicemail huntgroup to make sure that all ports are answering.  When calling internally I can see on the phone when the voicemail port picks up and sometimes the ring will change to a double ring.  We do have networked voicemail and we have only seen this issue on phones that are not resident on the same controller as the voicemail.

[ralph]

I can't imagine that this would make a difference but:
(1) what type of VM do you have.
(2) How are you networked?  IP, MSDN?

I'd say I'm baffled. 

Ralph

[swilson]

1) We are using embedded voicemail
2) We have 13 controllers all IP clustered together and two of them have voicemail boxes on them.  The issue is only happening on one of the controllers with voicemail boxes.

[ralph]

Humm.......
Ok, this is just a theroy.   When the 3300's talk to each other, it's talking via UDP meaning that the PBX will throw a IP packet over the fence and really not care if it got it or not.   A possibility is this:  The IP phone sends a packet saying to ring VM.  The 3300 sends a packet to the phone telling the phone (or other 3300) to play ring back.  The vm answers and the 3300 sends a connect message.   Now if that message gets dropped perhaps the audio stream would still be connected but the phone doesn't know it.

Just a theroy and I admin I'm grasping a straws and no doubt I'm confusing some Cisco CM stuff.   You may want to check your network between sites.   Check all your data switch interfaces for error and perhaps even do a ping test with a load.  (ping <IP address> -t -l 80)  Let it run for a bit to see if you drop packets.

Some more questions:
Are the callers always originating on trunks or also IP phones accross the net? 
Which system is the call originating from?
What happens if you call a phone with the problem from one of the other switches?
When was the last time you rebooted both systems?

Ralph
www.aavoicepro.com/checkpoint

[swilson]

Just to let you all know we got this figured out.  The timer for first and second alternative was set at a second apart and our voicemail gets hit pretty hard.  We increased the second alt timer and it is working normally again.  It was trying to use both the 1st and 2nd alt at the same time when the voicemail didn't pickup right away.

[ralph]

Thanks for the update.  It was a brain teaser for sure.  It's good to know what the issue was.

Ralph

[Chakara]

  Yeah, thanks for letting us know what the solution was....