Cisco Voice over IP phone system

[daviddunnsr]

I have been called over to an abandoned office complex to evaluate their system.  All the offices have CISCO IP telephones all connected to a wall jack that is labeled IP only.  There are no other network connections at the phones.

I went into the server farm and found 3 HP servers marked Unity, COM 1 and the last I didn't see any nomenclauture.

Now, when I fixed the power supply in COM1 and put it back on line all the phones say something like "reinitializing" but nothing ever happens.  

the 3rd server marked UNITY has a bad PwrSp which I'm changing out next week.

Question is there are only three cables dangling where the servers were installed in the rack.  The one unidentified server has one network cable connected to it.  The 2nd server I connected LAN1 and LAN2 cables to respective ports on server 2 and the 3rd cable, just marked "7" to the iO2 port on the server.  When I get the UNITY server running again, I don't see anything to plug into it's ports.

Need help understanding how these three components make up the IP system, if there is another "box" that is required like a catalyst interface and how these are all connected together.

I found the POTS incoming lines which appear to connect to a patch panel in the comm room with hundreds of cables running into and out of that patch panel.  

I've not messed with the CISCO phone system so steep learning curve.  In my mind there should be an interface box between the incoming POTS connection and the CISCO IP telephone system.  The CISCO system should have a controller for assigning lines, mail boxes, intercom lines, etc. and a CISCO box handling the database of end users.

anyone that can point me in the right direction on this maze ???

[Dennis Mink]

The Unity box, does voicemail. COM1 is probably your call manager  and by the sounds of it, not redundant, because your phones were "initializing" when you powered it down.

You are absolutely right, there should be something called a Voice Gateway, into which a POTS line, ISDN line is plugged into that allows telephony "to the outside world".  this is what you call "the controller", and is most likely a cisco router with an FXO or ISDN card in it. that device is IP on the back end and your call manager should be able to connect to it.

Do a network scan and see if you can pick up the IP address and see if you can locate it that way.

otherwise log into call manager and see what the ip address is from there.

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