Hey everyone this might be a really stupid question. I know Cisco phones use the Skinny protocol by default and that they do support SIP firmware. The one thing I’m confused with is how I get the firmware on there. I bought my first Cisco phone on eBay which was already SIP flashed they said ready for Asterisk. When I plugged it in it already had the SIP in the top right and so on. I’m familiar now with how to set it up using tftpboot etc, and I know that it checks there for its firmware when booting up.
Is that all there is to it though? Just drop the SIP firmware into that folder, edit the config files to point to that firmware, then when the phone boots up it loads the SIP firmware? I would have thought that you had to flash the phone or do something to it and risk bricking it. Should I pay more and buy the ones that people say are Asterisk ready or save like $50 a phone and get a normal one? Looking at the 7940g or 7960g.
to reset. Hold down the # key and fire the phone up. Keep it down until the lights on the side will flash in sequence.
On an SCCP loaded phone, you need to type the following to reset the firmware 1673492850*# the lights will change from orange to red and the phone will reboot.
That should fix most of the bricking issues too.
You will need your sip firmware and your SEPmac.cnf.xml to tell it what the settings are. Check out voip-info to get those settings. The SIP firmware is a little touchy, so be careful which one you use. again, check the forums.
To reset a SIP handset, do the same except the sequence is 123456789*0#, that will allow you to go back to sccp.
Personally I find the chan_sccp_b project seems to work the best with Cisco 79xx phones. You can use SIP as it allow you conrol of the handsets using AMI.
The Cisco phones are nice, other brands like Snom, Polycom, Aastra and the cheaper Sipura / Linksys / Cisco Small Business work really well out of the box with Asterisk. If you can get the Cisco’s working, you’ll be happy. Its just a bit of a hassle.
Hey Chris thanks for your help I appreciate it. Just a couple more questions:
In terms of the code to reset the firmware, is that definitely what the code is? Or is there a chance that that code won’t work and I’ll be hunting forever trying to find it?
Secondly once it’s reset, is it just a matter of having the firmware and the right files in the /tftpboot folder and the phone will install it when it starts up? Right now I have all that in there and my current SIP enabled Cisco phone works perfectly with it, pulling all the config from the files so pretty sure I’d have that down. The only thing I noticed was that the guide I used had the version 11 firmware but when I went to download the SIP firmware there was version 12 in there too so I set it up for 12. When I checked the logs on my phone, it says it’s running version 9 firmware and showed an error when trying to use version 12. So I’ll have to make sure that I can get it working with at least 11 or what not first to make sure that’s correct, or do I need to do that reset thing before the phone automatically updates the firmware?
Do the reset thing.
Thats the code for the 7971, with the colour touch screen. I am assuming it works the same on a 61. I have one here, but I haven’t plugged it in yet. I’ll be doing that sometime in te next couple of days and I’ll let you know.