asterisk users - Jan 2006 - SPA-841 spontaneous voicemail problem

Hello.

A while back, I noticed an odd problem with our SPA-841 phones connected
to Asterisk. Now we are having a different odd problem, and I'm not sure
if they're related. I wonder if anyone else has experienced anything
else like this, and/or if there is any reasonable explanation?

Occasionally, one of our SPA-841's will spontaneously start up with
"Welcome to Comedian Mail!" on the speaker phone. No one is near the
phone or touching it. It is as if the Invisible Man walked up and pushed
the "dial voicemail" button. I have obviously been unable to reproduce
this problem, and I'd say it has happened maybe half a dozen times or so
that I know of, on approximately 35 phones over the last 5 months.

These phones use unroutable IP addresses, and are on a dedicated
network which is not physically connected to the Internet. The only
non-phone devices on the same physical network are the Asterisk server
and a configuration server for the phones, so it seems unlikely to be
rogue packets.


The new problem, which may be related but I have no idea at this point:
this weekend I got 2 reports of cases where an agent
(AgentCallbackLogin) is on a call (with a customer, via queue()), and
the call is suddenly interrupted by Allison's voice announcing
something. In one case, it was the Comedian Mail login prompt. The
other case was a prerecorded prompt we use before calls are sent to one
of our queues.

I have no idea how this audio stream could be merged with the
agent/customer conversation. We do not have meetme turned on, so I can't
imagine Asterisk would be doing the audio stream merge. The only thing I
could think of was that the SPA-841's were spontaneously dialing
voicemail and doing a "conference" at the phone itself.

However, this doesn't explain the non-voicemail prerecorded prompt. We
don't have any direct-dial extension which plays that prompt. You need
to dial in from an outside line, and choose at least one menu option,
before you can hear that prompt. So I still have no clue how the phone
could be doing this, and no clue how Asterisk could be doing it.

I am again, unable to reproduce the problem.

In the message log, around the time of the "other prompt" issue, I
saw:

Jan 6 13:38:15 NOTICE[7627] channel.c: Dropping incompatible voice frame
on Local/228@internal_extensions-e87c,2 of format ulaw since our native
format has changed to slin

However, the logged channel Local/228 is unrelated to the SIP phones or
the PRI where our calls come in, so I don't think this is likely to be
related to this problem. I don't see any other log lines which are out
of the ordinary.

At the time of the "voicemail prompt" problem, I see:

Jan  9 09:33:20 WARNING[7627] app_voicemail.c: Couldn't read username

This makes sense, but isn't very helpful.

I'd appreciate it if anyone could shed any light on this situation,
though I admit I don't have very high hopes.

Thanks,

Alan Ferrency
pair Networks, Inc.
alan@pair.com

> Occasionally, one of our SPA-841's will spontaneously start up with
> "Welcome to Comedian Mail!" on the speaker phone. No one is near
the
> phone or touching it. It is as if the Invisible Man walked up and pushed
> the "dial voicemail" button. I have obviously been unable to
reproduce
> this problem, and I'd say it has happened maybe half a dozen times or
so
> that I know of, on approximately 35 phones over the last 5 months.
Actually we've been having almost the same problem in our office for the 
last month or so. Suddenly in the middle of a call, our normal autoattendent 
kicks in and talks over the top of an existing conversation. I haven't found
any pattern to it and I'm not sure why it suddenly started happening, but we
are also using the SPA-841 phones. I updated the firmware not so long ago, 
but I'm not sure I could tie the problem to that point in time. I'm
running
3.1.4(a) firmware.

Is anyone else seeing problems like this?