I’ve had enjoyed a working Asterisk PBX for the last year. We’re using the lastest version of Trixbox with a PRI to a Nortel Meridian with around 15 grandstream phones. (GXP2000 & BT102)
I bought 40 BT200 from VoIP supply which I have been having serious problems with. When we first set them up we found they had a later version of the firmware than was listed on the grand stream website but the configuration went fine so we didn’t worry about it. I left one demo phone setup to test with and went home. Four hours later my entire network was down. The BT200 was sending gratuitous arp packets claiming it was my DHCP/DNS/LDAP servers. I turned it off. Next day I setup another BT200 and it started doing the same thing after a couple of hours of working fine. I’ve since downgraded to 1.1.6.16 from 1.1.6.27. The phone no longer take the network down but they do drop off the network after about an hour and start sending ARP packets asking for the MAC address of the DHCP server. When this happens they stop responding to any network access (HTTP/Telnet/SIP/ICMP)
I have moved the test BT200s to an isolated network and they continue to show the same behavior.
Has anyone else run into this and if so did you fix it?
THanks,
Jason
Budgetone 200
trouble shoot
troubleshoot
hang
crash
I have two Grandstream phones on my LAN working with * and no I have never seen this problem. One of my phones is a BT200 just like yours running this version of the firmware:
Program-- 1.1.4.18 Bootloader-- 1.1.4.6
I have this phone set to NOT automatically update it’s firmware and only updated it once in the year or so I’ve had it. I just noticed that this phone has been online and working fine for 70 days.
The other phone is a GTX2000. I allow it to check for updates and install them each time it boots. So far no troubles with it either. Sorry to hear you’re having troubles with GS phones. There’s a lot of people who will tell you to steer clear of them but I have had nothing but good performance from mine.
VoIP Supply has been responsive but is unable to solve the issue. They are passing it on to grand stream technical support. I’ll post updates in this thread.
I have 12 BT102 and 3 GTX2000 that I’ve had for a year with no problems. Thats why I bought the 40 BT200. I figured the performance would be similar. Unfortunately that hasn’t been the case.
I did a little experimenting with this and updated the firmware on my BT200 to 1.1.6.16 and the phone began to behave peculiar. When I tried to login to my voicemail box * kept saying “login incorrect”. I rebooted the phone and that problem went away but now when I use the # key to tell my dialplan to hangup the call I get a busy signal from * instead of the call cleanly hanging up. But only on the BT200 phone with the updated firmware. The GXP2000 is still working flawlessly. I can manually hangup the call on the BT200 and all is well again, but there does seem to be something weird with this firmware update. Let’s hope the Grandstream techs figure it out and patch the update file.
I did a little experimenting with this and updated the firmware on my BT200 to 1.1.6.16 and the phone began to behave peculiar. When I tried to login to my voicemail box * kept saying “login incorrect”. I rebooted the phone and that problem went away but now when I use the # key to tell my dialplan to hangup the call I get a busy signal from * instead of the call cleanly hanging up. But only on the BT200 phone with the updated firmware. The GXP2000 is still working flawlessly. I can manually hangup the call on the BT200 and all is well again, but there does seem to be something weird with this firmware update. Let’s hope the Grandstream techs figure it out and patch the update file.
Grandstream has been proactive in trying to fix this problem. They contacted me by phone when I didn’t send them data they needed. I’m impressed. I was told that by the tech I spoke to that he couldn’t recreated the problem but that another grandstream office had.
I’m running a test with one of the phones on an isolated network. Hopefully it will crash again. They had me setup syslog at debug level pointed at my asterisk server and run tcpdump to record the data.
That was this afternoon. Since then they have contacted me via email twice to keep track of my progress.
I would call this good technical support. I hope I can provide enough data so that they find a solution to the problem.
I was just looking on Grandstream’s site and I can’t find the older version of the firmware. I too want to downgrade my phone because it’s now behaving very sporadically. The problem with my voicemail telling me “login incorrect” did not resolve like I thought because it just happened again. And instead of cleanly hanging up a call when I push the # key I now get a busy signal. My GXP2000 phone is not showing any of these problems and it’s connected to the same * server on the same LAN.
I think the GS techs owe you and I some explanation.
If you want to update to the latest firmware they have at GS’s website then you need to configure your phone with the proper URL address. Actually they list the IP address of the URL in the table at this location:
I’d be careful with this. Why don’t you wait until we get a firm answer from Grandstream on this. I am actually downgrading my phone’s firmware back to 1.1.4.18 to see if I get back the solid performance I had prior to upgrading. The performance since the upgrade is not impossible to deal with it’s just that I had solid performance with it and just want that back. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke…don’t fix it.
I already upgraded. Now I’m trying to figure out how to downgrade. I have the eariler bins and a tftp porogram, but the bt200 keeps looking for a later version (bt200e instead of bt200d). Can you tell me how to change that?
I tried downgrading too. It appears that the phone will not downgrade the earlier version. Like I said, the phone is working and it seems well. It’s just that one little thing with hanging up via the # key that used to work with the earlier version that seems to be the issue. And it’s really not an issue so I’ll keep the new version. Incidently when I read the docs on the new version there does appear to be some merit in all the new fixes that should make the upgrade worthwhile. So for now I’m sticking with the latest firmware.
It’s wierd how this is only affecting my BT200. The GXP2000’s in my LAN are not having any trouble with the # key hangup. They simply hangup and quietly wait for the next call. The BT200 nags with a busy signal until I manually hang it up.
Perhaps the next firmware upgrade will resolve this.
Grandstream’s support group found the problem and released a new firmware version. I’m running 1.1.6.30 on my test BT200 now. The debug firmware they sent me before didn’t fail.
I’m going to leave it running over the weekend to see if the phone will stay online and registered.
I think there must be something to this because now all my GS phones are acting up. Even the GXP2000 will not reboot when commanded to from the web interface. It is intermittend but almost all attempts to reboot it from the web interface fail and I have to unplug it to get it to do so. This was not the case for the last year that I’ve been using this phone. I hope GS is working to resolve this as I have three of their phones and I don’t dare put them into production.
I think there must be something to this because now all my GS phones are acting up. Even the GXP2000 will not reboot when commanded to from the web interface. It is intermittend but almost all attempts to reboot it from the web interface fail and I have to unplug it to get it to do so. This was not the case for the last year that I’ve been using this phone. I hope GS is working to resolve this as I have three of their phones and I don’t dare put them into production.