PVX 8.0.4 Intermittent Connection Issue

[televideoguy]

Greetings!

I recently re-loaded PVX on my HP Pavilion and am trying out the Vista compatible version (8.0.4 - easiest way to find it is a Google search - Polycom isn't exactly trumpeting its arrival...). It works great once connected in a call, but I have an intermittent problem connecting to our MGC100 MCU. The status will sometimes show as 'dialing' and never get past that point. After I try a few times and I see the status go to 'ringing' it always connects but the amount of tries varies before it works.

We use the GNU open-source gatekeeper and when I do a Wireshark trace, I can see that although registration is working correctly, sometimes the GK is allowing call setup to proceed and other times it is not. Although it was a while ago when I used it, I now remember seeing this same behavior with PVX 8.0.2 as well. I decided to try connecting to Codian's demo 4500 MCU in California using the IP address for comparison. I get exactly the same results in this gatekeeperless mode as I do with the MGC/GNU setup. Both dialing approaches exhibit the same intermittent connection behavior.

I always seem to be able to connect after a variable number of tries, but am preparing to start supporting a Codian 4220 and a lot of copies of PVX in a pilot project and would like to understand the mechanism behind this behavior - I can't help but wonder if others have observed it as well. I am behind a small PIX firewall - 6.3(5) - on this PC and haven't opened up any incoming ports, but outgoing traffic is wide-open.

I spoke to an experienced network admin at an institution I work with a lot, and he said his installation of 8.0.4 did the same thing for a while, but then the issue went away. I'm interested in hearing any thoughts anyone has about what is causing this behavior.

Thanks!

[crussellp]

Have you looked at the H245 process? Sometimes I have seen that behaviour when protocols were not auto negotiating. Set the protocols in the participant's properties in the MGC and set them to the same on the PVX... see if that works.

[televideoguy]

Thanks for the suggestion about H.245. I didn't get back around to doing more packet tracing but I think I figured out a resolution to the problem. I noticed the lock icon in the lower right-hand corner of the screen was sometimes indicating AES was active, but not all the channels in the call supporting AES encryption, so I found the AES setting in the interface (Setup-General-Call Settings) and changed it from 'Auto' to 'Off'. Now I am able to connect every time to multiple MCUs using either a GK or an IP address. We do not use encryption at all in our network.

I still am unable to connect to transcoded calls on the MGC100s - No matter what call rate I choose, I get an error that says there aren't enough resources to connect, but I'll have to look into that next...I wanted to post the solution to the above problem, though, in case it helps anyone else out.

Thanks again for the response!