Vague (and apologetic) general enquiries

[JudasD]

Hi,

I've inherited a site which is running a Mitel 3300 CXi II Controller - this is maintained by a third party.

I'm looking after the IT side of the company haven't been entirely convinced by a couple of answers I've got when enquiring about the setup.

Their Mitel Controller is running DHCP in the same range as the server (also running DHCP) and both PCs and phones are connected to the same switches. Is this normal/recommended? In my minimal previous experience, phones have been on a separate switches, IP range and/or VLAN, so this seems a bit odd. Considering there are three 24 port switches (1x PoE, 2x not) plus the Mitel unit for a company of 20 I'm wondering if things were previously separate

We've also been enquiring about the use of TAPI to dial phones and currently the only option I'm being given is dialling via middle-ware (unified communicator? Ironically the call quality when talking to him was quite poor, but that could easily be my office)

When pushed - apparently the reason for the overlapping networks was to allow the softphone software to work and also to enable connecting PCs to the pass through ports on the handsets (which is interesting as this is specifically not how the PCs are connected currently)

Everything is working and not causing issues, but I'm just a little twitchy about some of the responses.

Sorry if this isn't the place for this area of queries - feel free to politely tell me to go away
J

[ralph]

I'll leave the TAPI question to others but as for the DHCP: Huh?!!
When would you ever have overlapping DHCP scopes?

I've set up many systems using one DHCP server with one scope (even though it's not recommended) so that wouldn't surprise me at all.
However I would think that in your setup, you could get IP conflicts that could really cause some grief.

A normal set up would be to use VLANs with your 3300 handing out IP addresses only on the voice VLAN.
This of course would still allow you to plug your PC's into the phones.
If you need softphones you'll have to have a router of some type between them.

Ralph

[jrg0852]

I'm with Ralph. You could turn off DHCP in one or the other, but do after hours and test, to be safe. I think IP conflicts will happen eventually if you don't, and the 3300 doesn't like that. It will reboot itself at a certain point.

[x-man]

Could the 3300 have been set to hand out addresses only to mitel phones? yes you will eventually still get IP conflicts but somebody could have misunderstood what the setting actually means....

[markyb73]

Xarios Phone Integrator is a good product for TAPI on the 3300.

[JudasD]

If the Mitel can do that (assign IPs only to phones) it would explain why none of the PCs have grabbed an address from its range yet.

The "unmanaged" switches have turned out to be managed, but with all default settings - three different brands to add to the fun.

I'm going to push the phone company to see if we can move the IP range. Although we're ok now, it'd only need 4-5 more staff with mobiles etc to start me worrying about an overlap.

Do we really need an additional router if using softphone? Again, I've not used Mitel systems heavily but on other systems there's been a port to connect the phone server to the data network and it has managed dialling.

J