Allworx Technical Support Forum

So I'm helping out our Lead IT tech with a pretty frustrating problem. Three of our company phones will start up, work perfect for half an hour, then stop working with an 'Registration Error' message. We have tried different physical phones, ports, chords, profile settings and nothing works. It seems to follow these three users no matter what we do! I know it is vague, but any idea why this is happening only to these three users?

Also, I should note when this problem started. About a week ago all of our companies phones went down do to a problem with the switch (All phones down with red lights, and code displayed on the screen). The Lead IT Tech took care of the switch, and I don't know all the details. But we ended up setting all phones in our company back to default settings, and that fixed the problem. These three phones seemed to come back on, until, half an hour later, and every half an hour since, we get Registration error...

Any help would be much appreciated!

Looks like we solved it! It is the physical phones themselves. We tried a brand new phone, and switched over the employee's profile to it. It ended up working and has worked for a couple hours since. Although, we only had one extra phone, so we are having to order two more... Costly problem...

*I know this is an old post, but I thought I'd answer anyway, in case someone comes along looking for advice or a solution on something similar.

It sounds like you probably had an IP conflict on the network. Basically, two devices fighting for the same IP address will cause this. Depending on your network structure, type of switches and so forth, what can happen is a switch retains an old mac/ip assignment for a device even though your router (DHCP server) has handed out a new one to the device and reassigned the old one to a new device. As a result, both devices think they should be on the same IP. I've dealt with this many times, usually because of people moving things around and doing something they're not supposed to do with the network. Also, some mobile devices can really be a pest with this. Best to keep them segmented off your primary network if you allow employees to connect their cell phones and what not to your WIFI (you should do this for a multitude of other reasons though as well).

There are a few ways to prevent this from happenning again (each approach varies in its merits based on the size and scope of your network, number of phones, etc):
- Give your phones static IP assignments that are ourside of your DHCP pool but inside your primary subnet. This is done in the phone's network settings.
- Utilitize "static dhcp", "MAC to IP binding" or whatever your particular brand of router calls it, which will allow the phone to remain as a DHCP client, but the router will assign the phone a reserved static IP via DHCP.
- VLAN your phones so they are on their own subnet and don't compete with other network devices for IP space. This can be a complicated approach depending on your brand of network equipment and the type of switches that are involved, but works great once implemented.