Wahsington DC Network Outage

[VOIPoTim]

I understand there were problem with the Washington DC center. Presumably, this affects those on east01. And, these users were moved to Dallas. Curious as to what happens if they have softphones connected to east01. Won't they be dead (if Washington is dead; and, if not dead as the followup message says, wont they cause the previously mentioned issue with registrations - not sure if that's been disabled yet, in which case the softphones will be dead - on two different servers)? Instead can't games be played with DNS so that east01 points to Dallas? Or, does that take too long to propagate? Anyway, if reconfiguring the softphones is upto the consumer, this is all the more reason to make the server name visible in the VPanel. C'mon guys considering that you've created a new ATA Preferences menu where you can actually change values, adding a non-modifiable (read-only) label with the server name should be trivial to implement.

I wish it were that simple, but from a logistics standpoint, it's not.

We can look at adding some kind of server indication, but it's not really as simple as just throwing it up in vPanel based on past experiences.

What happens is people see East01 or Central01 or something and some immediately assume they should be connected to another server since it may be closer to them. Then we have angry people wanting to be moved around for no reason and really can't use any kind of automated balancing since users will be upset if they're moved even if there is no legitimate reason for it to happen.

In general, their preference will likely be where we end up putting them anyway, but we have to have flexibility to do what we need to do to balance things out and make changes along the way.

For the time being, we've put a fix in to prevent the looping from registering on multiple servers so softphone users should be fine.

We're also in the process of rolling out a new procedure for handling softphones and grandfathered BYOD users in which they have a 2nd set of SIP credentials and are completely isolated from the other SIP servers. We want to wait until this is done before getting into a lot of info about SIP credentials.

I know for most users it wouldn't turn into a problem, but from past experience, we've learned that if we give users too much information, it will cause huge support issues (such as users being confused with a device expires time listed). We don't want it to turn into a game of users wanting to be on specific servers unless they have legitimate problems.

Another similar example....right now we have some users that sniff packets to see how their audio is routed and demand that it's routed closer to them or in a different way even if they're not having issues.

We move users around regularly as needed to balance things, but this one was unique since it was a mass move of out DC. We do have the ability to force things for certain users, but want to leave that as a support option if we feel that it'll resolve an issue instead of it being a user-initiated change.

Ultimately, we need to find the right balance with giving advanced users enough information without it turning into a support nightmare, debating which server is better on forums, etc.