Man, I had a beast of a time setting up a Cisco 7960G to use a SIP image instead of the default SCCP image that came installed on it.
I purchased the 7960G from VoIPSupply.com about a week ago, and just got time to mess around with it yesterday. Surprisingly the system comes with zero documentation, either hard copy or a pdf on a CD. Zip, nil, notta, nothing, not even a CD period.
I skimmed through some how-to’s on VoIP-Info.org and got the jist of what needed to be completed before the Cisco 7960G would boot up and connect to the TFTP server and download the new SIP image. It all seemed easy enough from what I had read, after all it isn’t rocket science that we were dealing with.
First I found out that I needed to acquire a SIP image to install on the TFTP server. This I thought would be on a CD that came with the product. Wrong. Remember it didn’t come with a CD. I searched on VoIP-Info.org and figured out that what I needed was to get a service contract for the phone, which if I lived in Europe would only cost $8.95, but since I live in the good ole’ US of A, it was going to run be about a hundred bucks. I googled for the part number that I would need and sure enough I found it on CDW’s website, which was listed as $8.95. Outstanding! I figured Cisco finally came around and realized how illogical it was to charge US customers 10 times more for the same service contract that they were offering their European customers. Wrong again. I was contacted the following day by CDW and informed that they could not sell me that product as it was only supposed to be sold to people in… you guessed it, Europe. I finally ended up getting a Cisco SMARTnet Enhanced 5×4& Service Contract for $129.72. This Cisco Contract provided me with support and 4 hour replacement on the phone and other Cisco networking equipment that I owned, so all in all it worked out pretty well, just a tad more expensive than I had a originally planned on spending.
Now I had my SIP image downloaded and knew that I needed to configure the Cisco 7960G to get its IP from the DHCP server which was not a problem as that is how it was configured by default. The hardest part was trying to set it up to connect to the IP address of the TFTP server. All of the documentation that I read seemed simple enough but in reality they left out a few critical steps.
Below are the steps and some notes that I used in setting up the Cisco 7960G for use with Asterisk@Home:
- I went to the Cisco 7960G Software Download Site and downloaded the P0S3-7-4-00.zip file which contained the 7.4 SIP Flash Image for 7940/7960 IP Phone’s.
- Power on your phone and connect it to your network. You will need to change the IP address of your phone to a free one on your network or set it up to use DHCP, which is the way mine was configured by default.
- There are apparently a couple of ways to unlock your phone depending on which version of firmware that you have installed. For older phones you will need to press **# or on newer firmware select unlock config from the config menu and then type in the password (default is cisco).
- My phone was using older firmware (3.1 MF.G2) so I hit the settings hard key on the phone, moved the cursor to option 3, but don’t select it just yet. Press **#, then press the select soft key on the 7960’s screen. You should see the padlock icon with an unlocked appearance. Press 32 and see if you have a YES option (alternate TFTP). If so press yes, then go to option 8 and edit the IP address.
- From the CLI of your Asterisk box type: setup-cisco. This command will setup a basic SIPDefault.cnf in the /tftpboot directory of your Asterisk box.
- Upload the P0S3-7-4-00.zip file to your servers TFTP root directory wihch in my case was /tftpboot on the A@H server. Don’t unzip it on your workstation and upload it. For some reason it doesn’t work.
- From within your /tftbboot directory on your Asterisk box type unzip P0S3-7-4-00.zip.
- From the command line type cp /tftpboot/cisco_util/* /tftpboot.
- From the command line type chmod 777 /tftpboot/*.
- Reboot your 7960 by disconnecting the power cable. Your phone should be able to acquire its IP from the DHCP server (if that is how you have it configured), connect to the TFTP server and start the upgrading your phone to the 7.4 release of the SIP firmware.
- Once your phone has completed the upgrade, you will need to type rm /tftpboot/xmlDefault.CNF.XML and rm /tftpboot/XMLDefault.cnf.xml from the command line on your Asterisk box.
- After that, I rebooted the Cisco 7960G one more time for good measure. Everything worked as planned.
Now everything is working fine and dandy!