How can I get a Cisco Phone (7941) to work with asterisk

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I am trying to change the firmware on my Cisco 7941 IP phone from the default, SCCP, to SIP, so I can use it with Asterisk.

I am using TFTP Desktop, in the log it is say the following ( I have rebooted the phone several times):

Aborted 10.10.0.105 C:\Program Files (x86)\TFTP Desktop\CTLSEP001AA193E86B.tlv Octet, Send 10.10.0.248 21 Jan 13:27 Error
Aborted 10.10.0.105 C:\Program Files (x86)\TFTP Desktop\SEP001AA193E86B.cnf.xml Octet, Send 10.10.0.248 21 Jan 13:27 Error
Aborted 10.10.0.105 C:\Program Files (x86)\TFTP Desktop\XmlDefault.cnf.xml Octet, Send 10.10.0.248 21 Jan 13:27 Error
The error is just a file not found, because I didn’t change the xml config files.

And those aren’t even the firmware files, those must be the config files.
The firmware files are these, and I have them in C:\Program Files (x86)\TFTP:
apps41.8-4-0-79.sbn
cvm41sip.8-4-0-79.sbn
jar41sip.8-4-0-79.sbn
term41.default.loads
cnu41.8-4-0-79.sbn
dsp41.8-4-0-79.sbn
SIP41.8-4-1S.loads
term61.default.loads

How can I get the phone to look for the firmware files on TFTP?

Thanks in advance!

2

You have to have the SCCP firmware that is version 3, then load the SIP firmware of version 3.
Then you upgrade through the major version numbers til you get something decent, around v7 or 8.

The Cisco phones aren’t that good - they are big and don’t have enough feature keys. Sell it and get a snom or polycom - you’ll save yourself HOURS of pain.

3

Hi Abefroman,

We have a lot of Cisco 7940s (I have not upgraded a 7941) have you tried looking on the Cisco site for upgrade matrix/docs?

I would also like to partly disagree with Chris. Yes the Ciscos are big because they have big screens our users love them and the voice quality is superb. If you only have a few phones (or one) the Polycom is much easer to configure.

I have tested the 320 and 360 Snom phones; too many buttons and our users found them confusing (voice quality is good).

I do like the Polycoms (430, 501, 601) very much but we went with the Cisco 7940.

Brett