With regard to the Allworx Support, our reseller didn’t have the technical knowledge to understand our problems and Allworx said talk to your reseller. This went back and forth and we have gotten little technical help. I would love to simply call support and receive the excellent help you have, I truly would. I am also keenly aware that there may be some other network issue at play here though our enterprise network is behaving at peak performance otherwise. I would love to work with them to figure out the issues but they won’t give me the time of day and our reseller just doesn’t have the technical knowledge. So here we are. Stuck. With a product that might perform well if we could get support and figure out the issues. As it stands, our phones are the weakest link in our corporate network and we plan to migrate away from Allworx due to the too frequent problems, total lack of support. To your point, this piece of equipment is so important to our business that we will need to replace the Allworx product due to poor performance and reliability.

Thanks guys.

PS - Randy @ Allworx is an allstar!! Thanks for the all the help!

Interesting on the voicemail -> email pull vs. push.

I personally use a blackberry via IMAP to pull off the allworx box. It does work well I have to say! Others, we push out to their corp. email, but really haven’t had any consistent problems on that front.

Interesting - to hang the allworx right on the router. Do you then run the allworx in lan host mode? I was told that the 6x prefers that, as it frees up processing power.

I’d be interested to know what model switch you are using. We actually have our Allworx 6x behind the dmz port on our router which auto-negotiates to 100Mbps full duplex.

Anyway we’ve had some stabilization by putting a managed switch in place and slowing the port that the allworx6x plugs into down to 10Mb Full Duplex. Also disable broadcast storm control, and multicast filtering.

The speakerphone duplex - problem we haven’t had as much of an issue, its not perfect but it is better than the old system we had in place.

Hope the above helps someone else out there - and I hope it keeps working!

Also hope that Allworx/Paetec comes to the reality that they do have network phones and by saying its a network problem = means they have a problem!

About 1-2 times a month we reboot our phone system because something goes horribly awry. Our Allworx 6x commonly enters into some of the following situations:

1. Calls come in and ring at the stations but when a receiver tries to pick up the call, nothing happens. We have to reboot the Allworx 6x to recover
2. The Allworx 6x freezes and stops responding to calls entirely. Reboot required.
3. We have random failures either pushing or pulling voicemail emails. The email system doesn’t work very well with modern email clients and/or services. Reboot Required.
4. Many other odd or new situations in which a reboot is required for system recovery

I keep hoping that new firmware will fix the problems we continue to have and they do not. This coupled with marketing material that has directly false information (duplex speakerphones you say? What? Oh, I couldn’t hear you speaking at the same time because the speakerphone is in fact not duplex) is pushing us to look for something that is more reliable for the future.

We powercycled the unit and it started working again - called allworx and they said its a network problem - ‘no kidding’ they’re network phones. Something seems to be able to take the 6x off line… ?

Have you ever come across anything like that?

If you can’t browse the device it seems there may be larger issues. I would first try to take the 6x out of its working environment on a weekend and only hook it up to power and via lan to a laptop to see if you are still having the same problems. Next, I would backup my data (we backup weekly here to a remote server). Then I would restart and restore factory defaults and see if you have the same issues. After this I would try adding features back one at a time until you encounter the issue.

To see what version you have you merely need to log into the box at http://xx.yy.zz.aa:8080 then go to the maintenance-> update and you can see the firmware version. You will need to login to the same ip using ftp to put the files up there manually. The most current build appears to be:

Current version: 6.9.6.1
Build Date: Nov 18 2008, 15:02:51

The Allworx 6x box keeps the settings every time you do a firmware update although I do recommend doing a backup before any firmware updates.

VPN has nothing to do with your ability to login to your Allworx box locally. This is for remote users where the Allworx box is acting as the router and vpn router for your remote employees.

As far as getting into the Allworx box, you shouldn’t need to worry about remote access for the purpose of local administration and you should only be focusing on accessing and working with the Allworx box locally to bring the firmware up to the newest version and see if there is some setting that has been put in place that is creating a problem.

We can no longer browse to the administration page and configure it. We have to uplug the WAN and the LAN power cycle then plugin a laptop to the LAN port then we can get to the admin page. However then certain functions like Business->Users hangs when we click on it. I am hoping an upgrade to the Firmware will help but I could not see the button to get the files in the admin pages and after reading your post I doubt it would even work.

Does the router keep the configuration if we upgrade the firmware or does it drop everything? I am still not sure where to even see the Firmware Version.

The knowledge base on http://www.allworx.com states that you should have one available VPN connection even if you didnt not purchase that feater key so that you can VPN in and configure it.

“To access an Allworx System remotely you need to use Virtual Private Networking (VPN). All Allworx systems support one active VPN session. If you need up to 15 simultaneous VPN sessions, then you will need to purchase a feature key that allows this.
Your network MUST connect to the internet with a STATIC IP address. If your network connects to the internet with a dynamic (DHCP) address, then your WAN IP address will continually change and you may not know what it is to have remote access.

This document is based on the Allworx system being in Router or one of the Firewall modes.”

http://na1.salesforce.com/_ui/selfservice/pkb/PublicKnowledgeSolution/d?orgId=00D3000000018Wp&id=50130000000NcV3&retURL=%2Fsol%2Fpublic%2Fsolutionbrowser.jsp%3Fsearch%3Dvpn%26cid%3D000000000000000%26orgId%3D00D3000000018Wp%26t%3D4&ps=1

I cant even do the following

“Verify that you can reach the generic Allworx system webpage by opening another browser window and browsing to the WAN IP address. You should get the generic Allworx webpage with the client’s BUSINESS > CONTACT INFORMATION displayed on it. ”

http://na1.salesforce.com/_ui/selfservice/pkb/PublicKnowledgeSolution/d?orgId=00D3000000018Wp&id=50130000000NcV8&retURL=%2Fsol%2Fpublic%2Fsolutionbrowser.jsp%3Fsearch%3Dvpn%26cid%3D000000000000000%26orgId%3D00D3000000018Wp%26t%3D4&ps=1

Any Ideas?