SIP - NexVortex - Issues with latest firmware

[danplacek]

We recently upgraded a customer to the new 2.1.1 firmware. They are using NexVortex for SIP service. Following the upgrade, incoming calls did not work, they rang in, but did not get any audio (either direction). We confirmed that it was not NAT or Firewall related. It appears from my conversations with STAC and NexVortex that the latest UC320 firmware changed the SIP headers it uses and it is now incompatible with NexVortex. NexVortex has narrowed the problem to one of their underlying carriers, Level 3.

The reason I am posting is to warn anyone else on NexVortex or any other SIP service that uses Level3 media gateways, and also to see if anyone else has encountered this issue.

This poses a pretty serious problem for us because the latest firmware provided fixes for several problems that were a real pain to this customer.

I do have a packet capture from the WAN of the UC of the problem in action if anyone is curious.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

[Christopher Edgeworth]

Hi Daniel,

I think I've found your case number with the SBCS,  can you please provide and ask your SBSC engineer to attach the capture to the case.

Thanks,

Chris

[danplacek]

Thanks for taking a look Chris. Jon Snipes now has the packet capture, I assume he will be attaching it to the case.

EDIT:

This is the response from NexVortex:

"Level3 has acknowledged that they are not ACKing the 200OK, but are still investigating why this was happening. We will provide updates as we receive them."

(This is referring to the packet captures.)

Although we have confirmed that it is the 2.1.1 firmware that has caused this... it isn't clear whether the fault lies with Cisco or Level 3 at this point.

[nvadmin · Accepted solution]

As it turns out, this issue was related to an '&' that was being inserted into the configuration.  When the '&' was removed from the configuration, everything worked as expected.

Please remember to never use special characters in your SIP configurations!

[danplacek]

As Wes said, the issue was using a "&" in the "Company Name" field. The UC320 uses this field for both the "Remote-Party-ID" and "Contact" SIP headers. It appears that some gateways handle this... others don't.

Both NexVortex and Cisco were very responsive and helpful with this issue.

Thanks guys!