Unity, the phantom menace!

We had this one case open for like a month, and I decided to take a crack at it a few weeks ago. I thought it was a pretty funny issue, that I don’t see too often.

So there was this one user, that kept getting missed calls like 5-10 times a day. And they were always showing to be coming from the Unity server (based on the Caller ID). This was pretty annoying for sure and it was only one user that kept getting these phantom calls.

I’m thinking to myself, when does Unity call anyone? Unity can do message notification right? We get a new Voice mail and we can have Unity page, email or call us. I figured this was probably a good place to start, looking at notifications in Unity.

This first thing I’m thinking is there is no way I’m going through every subscriber and checking their notifications. I knew I wanted to be able to search subscriber notifications and see if any were set to dial her extension (let’s say her extension was 5125).

I opened the Tools depot and used the “Subscriber Information Dump”. You can basically use this tool to write all the subscriber properties to a CSV file and be able to search through them easily. I searched through and didn’t find anything that exactly matched her extension (5125).

I ran this during the day and didn’t affect the system, just make sure to monitor task manager when doing these things. You can also check the “call viewer” to make sure there aren’t a lot of calls to the system.

See below for Subscriber Information Dump location ::

I then thought that maybe someone had setup a call handler wrong and Unity was trying to transfer. Here is another tool to easily go through call handlers in Unity ::

Trust me, if you know Unity, using the Web GUI isn’t the quickest way…

I like this tool because it makes it really easy to see all the settings for a call handler. The funny thing is though, if someone was getting transfered, I wouldn’t expect to see the call coming from Unity on the caller ID, rather the outside caller or something (unless the transfer was setup as “Supervise transfer” which I think would then show Unity). Either way, no luck here either, couldn’t find her extension anywhere.

Now when I said I searched through the subscriber CSV file, I said I didn’t find any matches, well I did, but I ignored them at the time. Here are some things that matched ::

5125541234
5125639999
5125892345

Now these are not the real numbers I saw, frankly, I can’t remember them. The point is, I missed it the first time I searched through the text file. See it?

The first 4 numbers of those numbers match her extension. Right when I saw that, I was pretty sure I figured it out, I just needed to test it. So I called the local contact I was working with and had him make a call to the subscribers that had these numbers setup in their notification page (the CSV file tells you this info of course). I had him call one of those subscribers and leave a message and I wanted to see if we could reproduce the phantom call. Sure enough, that one lady at extension 5125 got a call from Unity. It just so happens that her extension was a pretty popular local number in the area. It was funny because there were 7 subscribers that had it setup wrong, so every time they got a new VM she got a phantom call. LOL

So the problem was that Unity notifications were setup wrong and should have been using a “9″ and then the number to call. In this case, it was matching based on the first 4 numbers and sending the call directly to the lady at that number. You also could look into restriction tables in Unity, but you have to be careful with those…

Anyways, a pretty easy fix once I figured it out.

Also, remember, you control what Unity can call based on the CSS on the voice mail ports in CCM.

This entry was posted on October 4, 2008 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Voice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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