Cisco 7940 - asterisk provisioning and New Zealand tones question

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breakaway

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#148823 1-Jul-2014 21:28

I imported a few Cisco 7940 handsets from eBay because they were dirt cheap. After some relatively minor tinkering I have managed to get them working with PBX in a flash and OSS endpoint manager for TFTP provisioning.

Unfortunately I am having trouble with two things

#1 - asterisk provisioning/phone reboot.
When I update the configuration on the PBX end, the phone does not reboot On command like the Yealinks do. There is also no way to configure the phone to make it re-check for configuration every few minutes. So once I make a change on the PBX, the only way to get the phone to pick up the change is to power cycle it. This is not such a big deal but it would be nice to get it working as intended. Has anyone had success/know any workarounds for this?

#2 - New Zealand tones
What do I need to do to make the phone do the New Zealand tones when the receiver is picked up (dialtone,busy etc)? I presume there is some sort of XML file with tone frequencies that needs to go on the TFTP server. If this is the case does anyone mind sharing theirs? There are surprisingly little information about this on the Internet.

sbiddle

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#1078399 2-Jul-2014 07:25

It's not the answer you want and doesn't answer your question but IMHO these phones should be used in the environment they are designed for - CUCM.

Yes they do SIP and yes they can connect to most SIP proxies (incl Asterisk) but these phones are horrible things that have a lot of issues in this environment as they were never designed to work with anything but CUCM. They also suffer from major NAT shortcomings because once again they were never designed to be used in a NAT environment.

At the end of the day there is a reason why these phones are only worth $10 - $20 each. To be completely honest if you're after cheap 2nd hand phones you would have been better buying SPA942s, you can get these dirt cheap ex Asia off eBay.

breakaway

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#1079245 3-Jul-2014 11:06

Hi sbiddle, thanks for the response. I was expecting something along those lines -- I suppose I will retire these telephones for use in my home lab.

Can you recommend a good phone with gigabit passthrough?

I'm inclined towards staying away from the less 'mainstream' brands because my experience with Yealinks has been somewhat negative (such as phones freezing / phones rebooting randomly / dialtone not playing for 5+ seconds after picking up the handset).

I've also worked with 942s and 7940s and found them to be of a superior... pedigree if you will, at leat from a UX perspective.

sbiddle

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#1079274 3-Jul-2014 11:45

Yealink T40 series are great, they're not buggy junk like Yealink was a few years earlier. The Digium phones are also fantastic.

New Grandstream GXP21xx series are also good, and the Cisco SPA5xx series is still a rock solid offering but are essentially EOL now (but haven't been officially canned) because Cisco fired most of their SMB staff. Don't expect anything new from them.

My favourite is still the SPA5xx series, however they're severely limited feature wise compared to most newer handsets and just don't handle things like call parking on Asterisk very nicely.

Peppery

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#1086449 10-Jul-2014 14:39

We run 7940s/7960s in our two-site Asterisk environment (purely on price point) and they've been solid once I finally figured out the golden config. I can't help you out with either of your questions, but they've been fine for us.

breakaway

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#1086454 10-Jul-2014 14:42

How do you manage config changes? The phones won't pick up a change in config without a reset... which means the only 2 realistic options are to telnet into the phone and issue a "reboot" command or ask the user to power cycle it. Perhaps the former method can be scripted and integrated into Asterisk somehow.

sbiddle

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#1086480 10-Jul-2014 15:24

You can remotely reboot a 7940 by sending a correctly formed SIP NOTIFY message.

New World

Shop on-line at New World now for your groceries (affiliate link).

cr250bromo

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#1086484 10-Jul-2014 15:38

I have significant CUCM experience and I'd agree it's probably more trouble than it's worth running them on asterisk, though as a geek I have done it :)

The config files the phone retrieves via TFTP are SEP<macaddress>.CNF.XML
and the tones (eg dial tone, ringing and so on) are 7960-tones.xml and g3-tones.xml (these change depending on the locale).
You can find examples of these online. You will likely need to use wireshark to confirm the files the phone is trying to retrieve and making sure the TFTP server is serving them up.

And yes you have to reset the phone to make it pick up the new TFTP config file - though once you've got it working, how often do you really need to reset it? In a CUCM environment you only have to reset if it's something changed in the config file via TFTP, eg locale, CUCM addresses, encryption and so on. The user facing features like divert, shared lines and so on are handled from the CUCM and don't require a reset.

churs
ben