unaddressed messages

[kmbell]

I am getting lots of "unaddressed" messages showing up in the UnityMTA folder that are blocking delivery of subsequent messages. All of these unaddressed messages are very short (< 3 seconds each) and all I hear is somebody hanging up a phone. I opened a TAC case (C594744) on the issue and the TAC engineer reference bug CSCdw41721 but said the registry fix would not work in Unity 3.1(3).<br><br>He said I need to find out the cause of the problem to prevent unaddressed messages from ever being created. The problem is, if they are so short I cannot figure out who they were intended for and there is no caller ID, how do I prevent them? My thought is that we will never be able to stop unaddressed messages completely because errors happen every now and then. But having the MTA back up every time we get one of those is a real problem. Any ideas on a fix or workaround?<br><br>

[#2]

couple things here... first, the Unity MTA folder should not be getting "Blocked up" any more. If it can't deliver the message for whatever reason (we've seen some AD corruption issues causing the recieving Exchange system to reject a message from us for instance) the message is moved into the undeliverable folder. We will try again with those guys after a period of time and keep logging error messages to let you know there's a problem but messages should not be getting backed up behind it (i.e. stuff is still moving through the MTA). If you can demonstrate otherwise, I definitely want to know about it.

As for the undeliverable messages... I'm betting you have a call handler somewhere (i.e. the operator or the Example Interview handler) that's setup with a bogus recipeient link (i.e. the guy setup to take messages for that guy has been waxed from the system). We should throw an error when the caller enters that handler (i.e. you'll get failsafe) but there's ways through this loop hole. Try running dbWalker and seeing if you have bogus recipient and/or administrator links in your system that are causing invalid recipient info.

Also, if you have messages in the undeliverable folders, the message is actually a pair of files... a WAV file and a txt file with routing information. It'd be interesting to see the text file and run some queries in AD to see if you have a badly formed DN or some such thin for an account causing this.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Technical Lead/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[kmbell]

Messages were in fact getting stuck behind the undeliverable unaddressed messages until I added the registry key HKLM/Software/ActiveVoice/UnityUMR/1.0/MtaFailedPath = c:\Commserver\unityMTA\Failed.

To try to figure out if there was another user's messages that could not be delivered, I moved all the messages out of the UnityMTA folder and moved them back one user at a time. Every time I moved a user's messages back, I would have to restart the AvUMRSyncSvr service to get Unity to deliver the messages. Otherwise, the messages would just sit there until I restarted the service.

I ran the new version of dbWalker and it showed no errors or warnings. So far, it seems to be only unaddressed messages that have problems being delivered. There is no Exchange recipient called "unaddressedmessages", which is what is shown in the "RecipientAlias" field of the text file associated with the voice mail wav file. Should there be an Exchange account called "unaddressedmessages"? If so, how would they get sent to the multiple recipients under the Unaddressed Messages distribution list? Or is this an actual Active Directory global or universal distribution list? I don't know if it's a related issue but I cannot delete users from the Unaddress Messages distribution list although I can add them.

[kmbell]

I was still having problems with distribution lists. On a test server, I deleted the record in the "DistributionList" table for the "Unaddressed Messages" list and imported it from Active Directory. That seemed to fix the problems with being able to add and delete users.

However, when I imported the list back in, some of the fields were different. "Undeletable" was set to "0" (which I expected), SystemDlistObjectId, and StreamPath (set to ). What is the importance of the StreamPath field and could I just paste the original value back in? Also, will the different values in these fields (namely the SystemDlistObjectId) have an impact on any other part of the system or does Unity take care of all this when the list is imported and the entry is created in the SQL table?

[#5]

so, what... are you monkeying around in SQL directly? That is oh-so-not-a-good-idea. From the sound of it you've broken the unaddressed messaged DL entirely which is not good. This is where all messags we can't deliver for whatever reason go and if it's not in the system properly those message go into the ether. Not cool. You've sailed well into unsupported waters at this point.

Not sure how this could possibly have "fixed" your poblem adding users since the unaddressed messages DL is not referenced in any subscriber templates anywhere unless you added it there. I'm thinking you have a very different problem going on, no clue what waxing the Unaddressed Messaged DL would have done to change the system behavior.

The DListSystemID gets added when you import a DL properly in the SA. If you just slammed it in in SQL then this guy doesn't get added and the object is not referencable in the rest of Unity. This is his unique Id used to "link" to this guy as the owner or recipient of a handler for instance. Without this value it's essentially a non object.

The stream files path is just the path the the WAV files for the voice name for this guy. If it's empty it's not a big deal since when you record one via the SA it'll create one for you.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Technical Lead/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[kmbell]

Absolutely NO modifications have been made directly to SQL on the production server. I have had a TAC case open (C583672) regarding the adding/deleting of users in the DL but the only response I have received at this point is "re-install Unity". I am leery of reinstalling the software on a production server because I'm afraid of what it would change in other parts of the server. I was simply looking for a way to fix the problem without having to reinstall the software. I realize that making manual changes is not the normal way to fix problems.

From what I saw, it seems the relationship between the distribution lists and Active Directory was lost. If I send e-mail directly to the "unaddressedmessages" alias, it works fine so I know the Active Directory part is working. I compared the DistributionList in the server that is not working to my test server, which is installed in the same type of environment (off-box Exchange2k) and working. I found the following problems in the production box:

1) AddrType for all distribution lists was set to SMTP where they were set to EX for my test server.

2) The SmtpAddress fields were NULL for all of the distribution lists in the production box where they had e-mail addresses in my test box.

3) The AddressId fields were NULL for all the distribution lists in the production box.

Once again, I want to emphasize that this problem had been going on for several weeks before I ever even opened up SQL Enterprise Manager. However, my customer is the AD administrator so it seems possible to me that they could have made some sort of change in AD that broke the Unity-AD relationship for distribution lists.

I understand completely that records cannot be just randomly created in SQL and have them work. That is why I asked about importing an existing "unaddressedmessages" distribution list into Unity through the SA.

[#7]

You might want to try a different tact... we have an SQL script that can recreate all the default objects (i.e. all the ones created by setup on a new install by default). This was done for sites that had deleted things like the opening greeting or the like and needed to get their system back on an even keel. Basically we can delete the DLs created by the Unity setup in your box, run the script and force a syncronization (which will create those objects in the directory again). We've done this on systems in the field where other system objects were waxed via various mechanisms and it worked out ok.

I'm not entirely sure this is the sum total of the problems. The DLs being funky might be related to your subscriber add issues but if you have taken out DL references in the templates and still had trouble, there may be other issues at play (i.e. the primary handlers for the templates themselves might be ill-formed somehow).

Ping me at my corporate email tomorrow and I'll email you the SQL script and some instructions if you want to give it a whirl.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Technical Lead/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)