The essentials

If you’ve encountered a problem it is essential to determine three things:

• What happened?
• What did you expect to happen?
• How to re-produce what happened?

Without there is little to troubleshoot. Then, in addition to your answers to the previous questions, the following steps are most helpful in debugging:

1. Is just one phone involved? (do other phones work correctly?)
2. Is it a problem you’re experiencing on just one pbx or more?
3. Have you verified that your internet connection and all your netwerk devices are working correctly? (this includes firewall settings, looking for NAT issues, broken switch ports, cables, connectors, DSL modem, ISP outages, etc.)

Voice quality problems like one-way audio or dropping audio can be traced to client-side LAN issues pretty much every time. Make sure you have disabled SIP ALG in your router/firewall. Most SIP helper functions in those devices are poorly implemented and cause issues. Also the pbx does not need them, so it’s better to disable SIP ALG, ICE, Stun in your devices.

Gathering more details

To gather more details you will need to login to the vpbx using SSH. If you’re running Windows you can use Putty as a client. If you’re running macOS you can use the built-in application Terminal.

You can do the following to gather more information:

1. login as admin user through ssh to your pbx (check your pbx firewall if you cannot connect)
2. then login to the Axeos PBX console by entering the command aox_console. you will then see the “CLI>” prompt
3. run core set verbose 7 to see more debugging data (to copy that data into an email to share with second line support staff if necessary)
4. if SIP debug is needed to see what the pbx and endpoints are communicating run pjsip set logger on (optional)
5. make a call (or connect your own phone)
6. turn off debug using the command(s) core set verbose 0 and/or pjsip set logger off so you don’t cause unneccessary load on the pbx. DO NOT FORGET THIS!
7. check the data that you have just produced to find out what is happening
8. check menu Status/Log Viewer in the web interface for log details
9. re-check whether or not the settings used in phones, PBX and SIP trunk provider are correct
10. If you changed settings you could repeat the proces from step 3.

If the cause is still unclear try to re-produce the problem to be certain it is either local or not. For example connect your own phone to the pbx. Or ask the customer to change the phone with an other one.

• Connect remote (hardware or software) phone to the PBX and try to replicate the issue
• Verify the status of the phones and/or SIP trunk
• Check the online Axeos knowledgebase

Support cases

If you need assistance please remember that the more complete your support case is the faster your supplier will be able to help you resolve the issue.
When raising a support case with your supplier provide them the following information:

• Describe:
  • What happened
  • What you expected to happen
  • How to re-produce what happened (the exact steps how to)
• Provide all the troubleshooting information you have collected during all the above steps
• PBX IP address and/or URL
• PBX software version
• Attach any logs and/or debugging data you’ve produced
• Note the the last time it worked OK
• Have you changed anything since the last time it worked OK? (if so, what?)