Ben’s Tech Blog

We have been running Cisco Call Manager for some time now as well as the Cisco Attendant Console software. Recently, the users of the company that we have merged with moved in to our office and we rolled out Attendant Console to the new management team. One of the managers reported that the line status was not updating (the icons that indicated whether or not another user was on the phone), instead they were displaying question marks.

After a bit of troubleshooting, I discovered that the Attendant Console software registers the client’s IP address with the Call Manager server; I’m guessing that the server uses this IP address to send line status updates back to the client. You can view the IP address that Attendant Console has picked up by openning the Advanced tab in the Attendant Console Settings dialog; it displays the IP address and port where it says “Local Host IP Address (for line state)”.

When I checked the Local Host IP Address I discovered that it had picked up an APIPA address (169.254.x.x). I then did an ipconfig and saw that this machine also had a bluetooth adaptor with the address that was registered in Attendant Console. Fortunately, when I asked the manager about the bluetooth adaptor he said that he didn’t use it anymore so I just disabled it. Once I disabled the device and restarted Attendant Console I could see that it had registered the correct IP address and the line status was updating as normal.

I’ve had a look at the documentation but there doesn’t appear to be a way to force Attendant Console to use a specific adaptor. You can manually specify an IP address to use, but in most environments where DHCP is used this is not practical.