Loss of Connectivity due to T1 Carrier regrooming

[dramsey]

Hello,

     I work for a company that offers voice and data services to the great state of Indiana.  We have several customer who are are on T1s that we get provided through a T1 provider like Century Link or Frontier.  When the T1 carrier re-grooms the T1 circuits, they don't notify us or our customer, which is not nice.  Because of the loss of connection and loss of timing, our AdTrans Total Access 900s, which we use ot provide the service, freeze up and won't come back up unless someone power cycles the unit.

     The bad thing is that, most of the time that the T1 carrier does this, it is at night.  Which means that our customer's phone and/or internet service is down all night and this makes for some angry customers.  Power cycling usually brings everything back up because of the fact that it has to re-initialize the connection and timing.

     My question is.....  Do you know of anyway that we can have the AdTrans restart themselves, if they loss connection to our service.  A service like ping watchdog, which pings an IP constantly and, if it misses a certain number of pings, it will restart the device.  We have this service in our wireless radio devices and it works great, but I know of no service that will do that in an AdTran.

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Hello,

What firmware are you running?

I have a number of TA900s deployed without any issues.

The T1 goes down when the carrier is doing maintenance and then comes back up.

.

[dramsey]

Hello unified,

We have tried many different firmware versions to try to solve this issue with no luck and, because of this, many of the AdTrans have different versions on them.  Too many to post, I'm afraid, but alot of them are running older firmware packs and some (the testing ones) are on newer packs and them some in between, but same result.  The Adtran will freeze up and become unreachable till power cycle.  We have to have customer power cycle our equipment, which becomes a big hassle.

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

I have been running R10.3.3, R10.9.3 both did not experience this issue.

One customer had their T1 go down every time it rained and did not have this issue.

I wonder if there is something else going on.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Mr. Ramsey,

Thanks for posting.  I'm not aware of any hardware or software issue that would necessitate the unit needing to be power cycled for any type of T-1 outage.  The ADTRAN unit should be constantly trying to reestablish the connection.  It's important to note that a power cycle also resets the interface on the far end, and this is what sometimes restores service.

I believe the troubleshooting should focus on the state of the unit when the link is in the down state.  I would start by having the end user report the status of the LEDs on the front of the unit while it is down.  This may give us some important data, but accessing the unit is the best way to determine exactly what is happening.  This can be done on the craft port with a serial connection, or a Telnet/SSH connection on the customer side of the unit.  The output of "show interfaces" will be most important as it will show us the current state, which types of errors the unit is seeing, and on which layer (T-1, PPP, frame-relay, IP, etc.) the unit is down.  Feel free to respond to this post if you have the output of "show interfaces" during an outage.  We would be glad to look it over with you.  Also, feel free to call ADTRAN Technical Support at 888-423-8726 if you would like to create a trouble ticket. 

Thanks!

David

[Anonymous]

Dennis,

I went ahead and marked an answer for this post.  However, if you are still having problems, ADTRAN would be happy to assist you. 

Thanks!

David