Cisco 7970 help - won't register

Hello -
I’m new to this. My experience is all routers and firewalls. When I wanted to set up a phone system in our small office, a friend suggested Asterisk. I checked around on the net - It looked good - so I went with it. I also found people were saying on the net that Cisco 7970 phones were good. I watched Kerry Garrison’s very well made tutorial: asterisktutorials.com/2007/10/ci … -ip-phone/

Except the tutorial deals with an old version of Asterisk. Kerry’s video does not really tell me what to do in the current version of FreePBX. Fields are different compared to what he used at that time.

Being a newbie, I downloaded AsteriskNOW!, and that installed just fine. I have successfully converted the phone to SIP (v 8.5.4, which is by all accounts a good stable 7970 software version for Asterisk) and I have set up the config files for the phones as per Kerry’s instructions.

The issue is that the phones won’t register (they are trying to), and I am not sure what options to use in FreePBX (which came with Asterisk Now). They get very close - the extension numbers appears in the window of the phone, so it’s getting something. But there is a phone with a red “x” on it also. No dial tone. What I’d like is someone to tell me exactly what I need to put in the different fields for the new extensions in FreePBX.

It is SO close to working - I can feel it. Help!

The boss is giving me the evil eye - I need to get this working. Can anybody please tell me what their Freepbx settings are for a 7970 extension? Thanks!

I’ve had no responses.

Sadly I am approaching the point where I need to consider dumping Asterisk and going with a Cisco solution - as my boss won’t consider dumping all the Cisco handsets he’s bought.

Any help would be appreciated.

Side question…what version of Asterisk is installed on your system?

From the Asterisk CLI do:
“core show version”

I’ll be in the office in a day or so and I’ll check then - I downloaded “Asterisk NOW” about three weeks ago and installed that.

There was an Asterisk release that escaped with a regression affecting Cisco phone registrations, so that’s why I’m curious. Find out what release you’re on, and then upgrade to the latest in that branch.

Do you have other types of Cisco phone working on that system?

I ended up getting a paid Asterisk expert in. He got the phones going. We only have 7970 phones.

Our Asterisk version is currently Ver. 1.6.2.19.

The issue we have with 8.5.4 is that phones take a long time to dial. It should be pretty much instant. We also put in a click-to-dial app for Outlook - that dials instantly, so I guess it’s the handsets. So trying now to get a version of phone sfw that fixes that.

Thanks to all.

Hey there,

Regarding that long time to dial - have you tried pressing the dial button or # after you dial the number? Is it a 5 second delay after you dial? If so check out voip-info.org/wiki/view/Aste … cisco+79xx (scroll down to DIALPLAN.XML). You might be missing a dialplan and by default the phone waits 5 seconds before it dials. If you create a dialplan it should dial according to your plan.

Stoyan

We fixed the dial problem by regressing to an older version of handset firmware. Thanks to all.