If you'd like to make a call...

The folks who administer the legacy PBX also administer the packaged VoIP solution we bought to serve an outlying site; VoIP is kept physically separate from the rest of the network. Seems the VoIP system failed after an unscheduled power outage: we lost one of three phases at the main building over the weekend, servers shut down, etc. Servers came back up with grace, but today I got the call to investigate the phone outage.

The telco tech-rep seemed to think that the BOOTP server at the remote site was not functional, but I demonstrated this was not the case by plugging in my laptop and pinging a phone. Suspicion fell on the physical layer, but I saw this was not the problem when I pinged the phone switch at the main site. So we trucked ourselves back to the main site to learn that the interface card on the phone switch was the culprit. A replacement is on order.

A fairly quick resolution, I thought, except I wasn't called in until three days after the first problem report!

I conferred with my colleague who is responsible for phones and he allowed as how more I.T. involvement could be a good thing.