69.1

[Vodia PBX]

We have made builds for 69.1. Windows and the Vodia IO builds is lagging a few days behind, but the other OS are ready. The release notes are also ready.

As you can tell by the name, we are confident this is a major leap forward. We have worked hard on making this version very stable and more scalable than ever. There are a lot of things under the hood that should keep us out of trouble for the next years:

• We have redesigned the threading, which should dramatically reduce race conditions that can cause hard to find and frustrating bugs on so many complex systems. It also improves the performance of the system.
• Memory allocation should be more efficient. This means the server needs less RAM than before for performing the same tasks.
• On the security side, passkeys make it impossible to steal passwords from the system which might be important in the upcoming years from compliance point of view. We really want to get away from users entering passwords, because this puts the burden of keeping those passwords safe on the system. 
• We started supporting EC-based certificates, however this needs to be explicitly be enabled. We will see if those certificates break TLS with older phones that don't support those certificates yet.
• We added might insights into the behavior of the SBC. Connections are now logged by default for the past 24 hours, making it easier to locate clients that need to be permanently blocked. 
• We have added something for better handling large recordings. Even when recordings are several hours long, the PBX can handle those large files better than before. 
• We have added FAX ECM mode for T38. We tested sending large documents without transmission failures. We will add this also for the inbound "analog" FAX and for outbound FAX soon.

But also on the more user-visible there are some important features available:

• Users can now start calls with video. This does not only work between desktop phones, it also works between the browser and Vodia desktop apps. 
• We have worked on the quality of the queue reporting and added some more popular metrics. 
• Text conversions now include voicemail messages and call logs.
• There were several topics on this forum regarding improvements with the user front end. It's clear that the user frontend will keep us busy for years — just another reason to make sure that the underlying PBX subsystem is solid.

We will have to release a new iOS version soon because of the changes in the text. We also have an updated Windows version in the pipeline that will take advantage of version 69.1.

[Quinntin Comer]

Appreciated! Cant wait to update the instance.

 

Is there a URL available for the update? I do not see it in the release notes and it is not available in the updates feed in the PBX. I see you the Windows release is lagging behind, but what about Linux?

[Vodia PBX]

You can use this link for now: http://portal.vodia.com/downloads/pbx/version-69.1.xml we'll update the links soon.

[Quinntin Comer]

9 minutes ago, Vodia PBX said:

You can use this link for now: http://portal.vodia.com/downloads/pbx/version-69.1.xml we'll update the links soon.

Excellent! Just updated our instance

[RichardDCG]

On 10/11/2023 at 6:57 AM, Vodia PBX said:

We will have to release a new iOS version soon because of the changes in the text. We also have an updated Windows version in the pipeline that will take advantage of version 69.1.

they will still be backwards compatible to V68, or will we need to check the version?

[RichardDCG]

under call queues - settings.  What are these for?

[RichardDCG]

On 10/11/2023 at 6:57 AM, Vodia PBX said:

We have added FAX ECM mode for T38. We tested sending large documents without transmission failures. We will add this also for the inbound "analog" FAX and for outbound FAX soon.

sending a fax inbound to the Vodia and it hasn't hung up ... even after I have recieved the complete fax to my email?  10 minutes and counting for a very small fax.

[Vodia PBX]

14 hours ago, RichardDCG said:

they will still be backwards compatible to V68, or will we need to check the version?

It will be backwards compatible.

[Vodia PBX]

13 hours ago, RichardDCG said:

under call queues - settings.  What are these for?

If you don't see the texts, check if you have switched to on your own translation (pbxaui/dict.json) and consider removing the file. The tab contains general settings for the queues, e.g. a table with wrap-up-codes.

[Vodia PBX]

11 hours ago, RichardDCG said:

sending a fax inbound to the Vodia and it hasn't hung up ... even after I have recieved the complete fax to my email?  10 minutes and counting for a very small fax.

Theoretically possible, but unlikely. Maybe you can open a ticket with the PCAP attached (don't wait ten minutes) and we can take a look if the sender was supposed to hang up or something else failed.

[Vodia PBX]

There is now 69.1.1 available including Windows and a new iOS build needed for the new chat history elements.

[Scott1234]

When I upgrade from 68.0.32 to 69.1.1  I can no longer receive inbound calls from the external SBC. (This is not specific to 69.1.1, it's just the first time I have tested an in-place upgrade or 69 at all)

What is it looking for that is different to 68.0.32 with regards to client hello ?

I use TLS everywhere, end to end normally. Switching to UDP will make it work.

[9] 15:48:47.759	SIP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:43985: Receive Client Hello(0303D0F6..00000000)ⓘ
[9] 15:48:47.759	SIP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:43985: Client Hello TLS version(0303)ⓘ
[6] 15:48:47.759	SIP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:43985: Session DFFC6302..7562B1F0 not foundⓘ
[9] 15:48:47.759	SIP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:43985: Matched cipher suite TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256ⓘ
[9] 15:48:47.759	SIP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:43985: Enabled secure renegotiationⓘ
[8] 15:48:47.759	SIP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:43985: Client hello did not match any known address, ignoring itⓘ

 

Edit - When I make a call q for testing and log myself in my phone wont ring, I just gets the hold music and waits in the queue, I don't get it? all the settings look fine.  Direct calls to phone work or hunt groups etc. Has there been some fundamental setting changes changed that I am missing? I could not spot anything. 

[Vodia PBX]

On 10/18/2023 at 3:51 AM, Scott1234 said:

What is it looking for that is different to 68.0.32 with regards to client hello ?

This is because of the setting "Ignore packets that do not match a domain on the system" (in /reg_security.htm). It's a good idea to have that turned on. 

There are two things you can do here. First, you can use the system management DNS address as a fallback address for devices that don't support the TLS SNI extension. Second, if that is not possible, you can set the setting sni_sip_ldap to true, this will override the "ignore packets..." for SIP and LDAP.

Oh and you should reprovision your phones. The templates should automatically set everything right. 

[Scott1234]

12 hours ago, Vodia PBX said:

This is because of the setting "Ignore packets that do not match a domain on the system" (in /reg_security.htm). It's a good idea to have that turned on. 

There are two things you can do here. First, you can use the system management DNS address as a fallback address for devices that don't support the TLS SNI extension. Second, if that is not possible, you can set the setting sni_sip_ldap to true, this will override the "ignore packets..." for SIP and LDAP.

Oh and you should retrovision your phonses. The templates should automatically set everything right. 

Thanks, I will check into SNI support on the external SBC. As I prefer to use "Ignore Packets" setting. This was working fine on the old version, is this part of a fix to support secure TLS renegotiation properly as for why its stopped working on this version?

Back to call Q and not ringing, I have to set the "Extension feature set" as "Call Queue" Agent vs "Regular Extension" for it to ring, is this the expected setup now?  what happens if that user also wants teams? what is the new "all function levels" setting?

[Vodia PBX]

On 10/18/2023 at 7:57 PM, Scott1234 said:

Thanks, I will check into SNI support on the external SBC. As I prefer to use "Ignore Packets" setting. This was working fine on the old version, is this part of a fix to support secure TLS renegotiation properly as for why its stopped working on this version?

Its a moving target... We are trying to make it better in every version, but obviously it's hard not to trip over anything. Plus the phone vendors are also upgrading their firmware. But while VoIP phones seem to use SNI on HTTPS, it is mostly not enabled on SIPS. If they do, we are enabling it in the template. 

On 10/18/2023 at 7:57 PM, Scott1234 said:

Back to call Q and not ringing, I have to set the "Extension feature set" as "Call Queue" Agent vs "Regular Extension" for it to ring, is this the expected setup now?  what happens if that user also wants teams? what is the new "all function levels" setting?

That was also a little bit of a learning curve. For prepaid licenses we are trying to ignore it, for postpaid the agent type is more than the Teams extension type. So the "all functions" would be the agent at this point. This was causing the problem that agents now includes Teams, which was causing a headache because of the inclusion of Teams in agent queues. Anyhow, as of 69.1.1 it should be working smooth. But we will eventually have to check if we still have to adjust this. 

[jvoiptel]

On 10/11/2023 at 5:58 PM, RichardDCG said:

under call queues - settings.  What are these for?

Most recent versions lists "Wrap-Up Code" - I understand you can now add call dispositioning codes during a live call. I tested it, but could not find where the reporting is. It really needs a pop-up window after the fact, which would be ideal for Contact Center operations. I hope we hear more.

 

[Vodia PBX]

On 10/11/2023 at 5:58 PM, RichardDCG said:

under call queues - settings.  What are these for?

Looks like you have turned on the translations in a previous version. In order to see the texts, you need to remove (or rename) the dict.json.

The wrap up codes or categories are there for the agents to categorize calls, so that later analytics can better understand what the calls were about. For example, categories could be "winter tires", "summer tires", "repair", "accounting" and so on. 

The codes are reporting in the nightly emails and you can also download the call records in the queue management in the user front end — obviously need to have the permission to manage at least one queue for that. 

[Vodia PBX]

On 10/11/2023 at 7:06 PM, RichardDCG said:

sending a fax inbound to the Vodia and it hasn't hung up ... even after I have recieved the complete fax to my email?  10 minutes and counting for a very small fax.

In the FAX calls that we did for testing it was always the caller that hung up. But it seems that that is not always the case and we need to disconnect after the FAX has been received to be on the safe side. We will do another FAX round soon anyway, the ECM for "analog" is still missing and this would further enhance the reliability obviously. 

[Vodia PBX]

On 10/18/2023 at 3:51 AM, Scott1234 said:

When I upgrade from 68.0.32 to 69.1.1  I can no longer receive inbound calls from the external SBC. (This is not specific to 69.1.1, it's just the first time I have tested an in-place upgrade or 69 at all)

You might have to retrovision the phones one more time. Fun fact is that while practically all of today's VoIP phones support SNI in TLS for HTTP, they don't do that by default for SIP and LDAP believe it or not. Some support enabling it, and for some we need to provision them in the way so that they will see the system management DNS address and not the tenant address as a dirty workaround. 

[Vodia PBX]

22 hours ago, jvoiptel said:

It really needs a pop-up window after the fact, which would be ideal for Contact Center operations. I hope we hear more.

There is an option for that in the queue settings, did you see that (Show post-call survey)? In the future we might add more stuff there, so we kept it under the term post-call survey.

[jvoiptel]

4 hours ago, Vodia PBX said:

did you see that (Show post-call survey)?

Thanks for pointing that out! I didn't realize you added this option called "Show post-call survey". I went ahead and tested it, and the pop-ups show up nicely for inbound calls. However, I don't see the pop-up for outbound calls placed by agents. In any case, this is great progress. 

During a call, I can categorize the call based on the disposition codes: 

After the inbound call, I can also see the wrap-up window immediately:

The History page shows me a "Category" column with the wrap-up name, and when I export the history to CSV, I see the category columns with wrap-up codes. Very nice, this allows us to provide further analysis to inbound queue calls. 

Nice work!

 

[Vodia PBX]

15 hours ago, jvoiptel said:

However, I don't see the pop-up for outbound calls placed by agents.

We'll have to spend some quality time with outbound calls as well. We have more or less quietly added a page for managing outbound numbers for outbound campaigns, but we need to work more on it e.g. a default wrap-up-code and statistics.