We have been battling with our IT Company, who installed the Sonicwall, and our phone carrier, who installed the Cisco router, for 14 days.
One of the two is blocking our phones from receiving DHCP.
We are asking for outside assistance. How do we determine which one is blocking our system from receiving DHCP?
We have been down for 14 days and no one is accepting responsibility. They are pointing the finger at each other.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
In my experience, there are two things you can do.
One of them is to try to arrange a conference call where they can all interactively blame each other in front of you. Occasionally this shames the responsible people into action.
The other thing is to actually isolate the problem and do root cause analysis yourself, and figure out what the problem actually is (which might be that your architecture is broken). Then, show your findings to the responsible vendor and insist they fix the problem, or find a new vendor.
In either case, there is not nearly enough technical information in your question for me to help you. Look at network dumps at various points (use wireshark and stuff) and watch for actual reasons your system doesn't work.
This question is heading for closure, but still:
DHCP is a broadcast protocol and you have mentioned at least one, possibly two devices that are routing packets. Assuming the DHCP server and the client are on different sides of these boundaries, you're going to need an IP Helper somewhere to get the DHCP requests to where they need to be. You haven't provided enough info to diagnose this.
If that makes no sense to you, then see HopelessN00b's comment above.
