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PRI Trace on ShoreTel Switch

This post is about how to do a PRI trace on a ShoreTel T1 switch. I couldn’t find good text instructions on how to do this on the internet. Dr Voip has instructions on how to debug caller ID but if you need a trace log, it won’t help much. It’s probably in the ShoreTel knowledge base, but I’ve been a little disappointed with this in the past. I won’t go into how to interpret the output either, this is just instructions on how to get a log easily for sending to your ShoreTel partner for analysis.
ShoreTel Partners: Feel free to send this page to your customers for instructions. I feel this is a thorough explanation of how to do this.
First things first, you’ll need some special software for this one. You’ll need a telnet client with logging ability, what comes with Windows is difficult get to log easily. Personally I like PuTTy. It’s a nice standalone application, and doesn’t need you to install it anywhere, just copy the putty.exe file wherever you want it, it’ll run from there. I keep it on my desktop at work, and on a shared folder.
The second thing you need to know is that you MUST do this from the ShoreTel server itself. This can be accomplished with a Remote Desktop session, you can not do this from a session on another computer.

  1. Remote into the ShoreTel server (or log in from the console), and fire up PuTTy. I keep a copy of PuTTy on my ShoreTel server, on the desktop of whatever admin account I’m logging in with.
  2. You’ll want to make a saved session for your T1 switch. So open ShoreTel Director and open the Quick Look page if it doesn’t go there by default. Click on whichever site has the T1 switch you need to get the log from. Make note of the IP address of that T1 switch. You’ll need it a lot.
  3. In PuTTy select “Telnet” and type (or paste) in the IP address of the switch up top under “Host Name (or IP address). One trick you can do is add an entry in your DNS server called “priswitch” and connect it to that IP address. Makes things a lot easier, just never change the IP. Go ahead and give it a label in the “Saved Sessions”  and click save. If you need to, select what you just saved and click “Load” to make sure it’s the session that is now active. You’ll know if you need to if the IP address field is blank.
    PuTTy settings for connecting to a ShoreTel switch.
    Yes, I censor IP addresses.
  4. Click the Logging item under “Session” and make the options look like below (click on the image for a better look). The file will be saved wherever the PuTTy.exe file is located.
    PuTTy Logging capture settings.
  5. Click on the Connection Item, and set the Seconds between keepalives box to 30. The ShoreTel switch will kick you out after about 60 seconds, so having it send a null packet every 30 seconds is handy.
    PuTTy settings for insuring connection stays up.
  6. Go back to the Session screen and click save. Now you have a session that’s automatically configured to keep whatever output comes from your PRI switch telnet session. Don’t open the session just yet, you have to allow access to the PRI switch.
  7. Open a command prompt and type this in and hit enter: “cd pro*sho**ser*”. This will take you to the ShoreTel server directory under Program Files.
  8. Type this in the command prompt: “ipbxctl -telneton [IP address of T1 Switch] ” and hit enter.
  9. It will ask you for a password. You can google this or get it from your partner. It’s not a hard password to figure out. If it was correct it will say something like “Telnet enabled”
  10. Open the session you saved in PuTTy. It will ask you for a username and password. This item is documented in your ShoreTel administration guide under how to set up a switch.
  11. In an old switch it will probably dump you right into the VMX shell. Most newer switches will give you an ASCII ShoreTel logo and a numbered menu. If this is the case, type “gotoShell”.
  12. This will give you a prompt that looks like this ->.
  13. You’ll probably get some random output at this point so you just need to type the following commands and hit enter and keep in mind you may not be able to see what you are typing. My advice is to just type slow and not worry about it. Most switches won’t allow the use of a backspace. So just be careful.
  14. Type in the following commands one right after another.trunk_debug_level=5
    pri_trace=10
    pri_log=10
  15. You’ll get a LOT of stuff just scrolling up the screen if you did this right. Now all you need to do is run it for however long you need the log for, or whatever your partner tells you to do. PuTTy will constantly dump the output in this window to a log file.

 
One thing I have found out is that it’s a good idea to have 7zip installed on your ShoreTel server as the log files you have to send to ShoreTel are huge. These log files will compress down very small since they are just text files and allow you to simply e-mail them to TAC or your partner.
 

2 replies on “PRI Trace on ShoreTel Switch”

Hello,
Thanks for this write up.
I’m seeing these in the log when a call comes in.
The caller just hears 3xbeep and disconnectes
Do you got any pointers?
In trunk_sip_send_register_signal(): ERROR : SIPIntf_sip.c:348 : errorCode:(-3000) (sipintf_sipcmd_update_from_info)
ERROR : SIPIntf_sip.c:1337 : errorCode:(-3000) (sipintf_sip_dvc_incoming_call)
WARNING : SIPIntf_RvCallLeg.c:760 : errorCode:(-3000) (SIPIntf_CallLegStateChangedEvHandler)

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