Comments on: Introducing the Cisco 7970 WonderPhone … Or Is It?

By: Justin

Justin — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 19:24:25 +0000

I have uploaded a provisioner profile for the 7970 but so far it has not been accepted. I have used it with IncrediblePBX on the Pi.

https://github.com/jnovack/Provisioner/blob/Cisco7971/endpoint/cisco/sip797xG/SEP%24mac.cnf.xml

By: Nerd Uno

Nerd Uno — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:10:39 +0000

Got this working with the latest PIAF2 builds. Just remember that the extension settings for a Cisco phone require NAT=No and Qualify=No if your server and phones are sitting behind a hardware-based firewall.

By: Alonso Auces

Alonso Auces — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:37:41 +0000

If there is anyone that can program these phones with trixbox service I would like to hire to program my phones please respond to 832-341-3530 ask for Alonso thanks, I faild at this project thanks.

By: Max DiOrio

Max DiOrio — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:32:52 +0000

I have my 7970 working in Trixbox and it seems to work – mostly. I have an issue where if a caller hangs up before I answer the 7970, it still shows that the line is ringing even though the other party is gone. Which means that the line button is flashing amber, and the active call list shows an active call. I can still call out/in on the phone. The strange part is that when the caller disconnects, the handset LED stops flashing red, and the phone stops ringing, but the line button still flashing and the display doesn’t clear.

Any ideas?

By: Edwin Williams

Edwin Williams — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:14:03 +0000

Has anyone gotten the Cisco 7970 to work with the Shout 900 made by N.E.T. Or even a non-callmanager.

By: Mike M.

Mike M. — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:21:30 +0000

Took a few hours to get it right (now that I found the link above in the blog post!) but I _LOVE_ the quality of sound on the 7970, and the color touchscreen is cool too. Now I have to "play" and see what else it can do.

Perhaps the SIP firmware problems are the result of outsourcing / offshoring development to faraway lands?

My e-bay 7970 came with SCCP, and I’ve flashed it (one version at a time) to SIP 8-5-3S without any issues. It’s now happily working with PIAF.

By: Reinhard

Reinhard — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:31:39 +0000

First I hated my Cisco 7975, now I love it 😉

http://trixbox.org/wiki/blf-busy-lamp-field-cisco-7975-how-apply-patch-trixbox-28-asterisk-16

By: matthewk

matthewk — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 02:01:16 +0000

I just bought a lot of 7960’s 7970’s and 7920’s for a few bucks. They all had non sip images on them. I found the software for the 7960’s, I am looking for the software for the 7970’s and I guess I am SOL on the 7920’s.

That is not why I am writing though..

I have used a bunch of different IP phones in both small and large roll installs.

For a small office install I just love the Grandstream GPX2000’s. $80, they DHCP and give you the ip address in the LCD and you can program them with a web browser. Slick and easy for a handfull of phones.

The Cisco’s and the Polycom’s with the XML are a bit more of a pain in the ass for a small roll out. At least with the Polycom you have the (limited) web interface. Cisco does not even give you that.

However, with a bit of shell sripting you can make a setup that will generate the proper mac addressed template files for the phones, and then allow end users or admins to do per phne custom stuff.

Not as easy for one or two phones, but if you have an entire office of say 200 phones to do, it would be nice to be able to start with a base template file and a text file with user names, extension numbers, speed dial numbers etc, and then run a script, generate all the files, dropkick the phones and have them set up and ready to go.

It would be nice for Cisco to add a web interface but I don’t think they are shooting at the market where they only have a few phones.

I am not fefending them. I am real unhappy about say the stronghold on the software and the lack of documentation, but I think in their market they are more concerned about rolling out 100’s of phones and not onesee twosies

By: daddum

daddum — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:51:35 +0000

anyone got a 7971 with SIP working with a directory.xml file ? worked ok on SCCP but i upgraded to SIP and it does not like the same file. [WM: See this PBX in a Flash forum thread for loads of Cisco information.]

By: Huh

Huh — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:06:20 +0000

Odd. I’ve been running a 7970 on Asterisk for years — right after they came out — without any issues other than the MWI problem right at the beginning. Updated it all the way from 8.0.3S to 8.4.2S when that was released and all was well, no muss, no fuss.

Seriously, I don’t get the hate for this phone. It’s been nothing but solid and stable for me.

[WM: You’re obviously not using SIP with the phone.]

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:20:51 +0000

John,

In your configuration file change:
0

To:

8.3.5S has a bug in the XML parser that will cause a complete failure to load the configuration instead of just ignoring the bad line.

By: John

John — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:08:57 +0000

Has anyone been able to get the 7970 running firmware SIP70.8-3-5S to work with trixbox? If anyone could provide a "working" SEPXXX.conf.xml for this phone, I would be glad to make a donation via paypal for their time. John – 214.669.8500

By: Sam

Sam — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:48:57 +0000

Good article, hits the nail on the head. Although new firmware fixes some functionality of the MWI, your still right in that many of the other advanced features we’re paying for just don’t work.

The call quality, and the phone sturdyness is better than most. The software is useless.

By: Robert Shedd

Robert Shedd — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:23:15 +0000

Has anyone been able to successfully get a 7970 to work outside of the firewall? The article mentions it’s water torture and that seems to be quite accurate. Unfortunately, this is the model phone we have and we need to deploy it outside the firewall. I’ve been able to configure the phone (using TFTP) successfully, however it now just sits there and states "Registering…". There are a few posts on the three XML NAT entries for the config file, but unfortunately, not as much documentation exists around this as for the rest of the process.

If anyone has been successful with this, any thoughts on how to complete the setup would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Robert

By: Mark Dutton

Mark Dutton — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:41:20 +0000

I have been trying to get the 7970 and other handsets using firmware 8.x to work on our Zultys SIP IP phone system. Every SIP handset we have ever tried works, but not Cisco. The offending line in the register method is

Supported: (null) …………..

Zultys comes back with a 400 BAD REQUEST (from memory)
I sent the logs to Zultys and they said that the problem is in the supported line. It is using brackets which are not allowed according to the RFC. Now Asterisk guys can write around this, which is the pragmatic way. But Zultys are not interested in writing "broken" SIP code to support Cisco invalid requests.

Does anyone know if there are any XML config lines that might change, or remove the supported field in the REGISTER method? I am pulling my hair out and I have a client with 100 7941 handsets that they want to put onto a Zultys PBX.

Regards

Mark

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:47:50 +0000

If firmware is on and you unlock you can just set yes to "Alternate TFTP Server" and you won’t have to go through DHCP hell. Otherwise good article, I laughed my ass off. Still wouldn’t give up this phone for anything, though. 😛

By: bvlmv

bvlmv — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:28:19 +0000

Greetings,
I’ve been following the steps mentioned about but when I try to upgrade it keep on telling the following:

10/17/2007 10:12 :Sending SEP000F90CEF7E0.cnf.xml to (192.168.0.90)
10/17/2007 10:12 :Sent SEP000F90CEF7E0.cnf.xml to sep0014f2d7110a (192.168.0.90), 8572 bytes
10/17/2007 10:12 :TFTP Error from 192.168.0.90 requesting United_States\7980-tones.xml : File does not exist
10/17/2007 10:12 :TFTP Error from 192.168.0.90 requesting English_United_States\7980-kate.xml : File does not exist
10/17/2007 10:12 :TFTP Error from 192.168.0.90 requesting English_United_States\7980-dictionary.xml : File does not exist
10/17/2007 10:12 :TFTP Error from 192.168.0.90 requesting English_United_States\SCCP-dictionary.utf-8.xml : File does not exist
10/17/2007 10:12 :TFTP Error from 192.168.0.90 requesting English_United_States\Unicode.font : File does not exist

or that the load is incorrect. I’m trying the same exact firmware mentioned in the tutorial.

My phone is on
Load file term70.default
App jar70.2-5-47-19.sbn
JVM jvm.70.499.kr5.sbn
os load id cnu70.2-5-43-17a.sbn
boot load id 7970_64060118.bin

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

By: Shane

Shane — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 20:18:57 +0000

Ive got the phone working now with the help of our VOIP providers Noble Solutions nad its fantastic. One thing I dont have, and cant seem to find, is a softkey template, or a guide on how to build one. Is this something anyone can help me with? Email address in last post

By: Shane

Shane — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:46:36 +0000

Great resource thanks guys one thing. Im not yet flashy enough to have asterix serevr her at the office and im using an offsite VOIP provider. Im trying to get my 7970 working with them, does any one have a working SEP{mac}.cnf.xml file they could send me that they know works with an ‘off site’ provider? Im currently on SIP70.8-2-2 any help would be greatly appreciated shane {at} creative-fusion couk.

Thanks again for a great resource

By: Kman

Kman — Tue, 22 May 2007 06:16:53 +0000

I really like the default fountain background that I have seen on the Cisco site for the 7970 but I currently have a different ugly default background. Anyone know or can provide a link where I can get DL the Cisco Fountain background. I googled it for an hour or so and all I found was references to files names CiscoFountain.png and Fountain.png on various sites but no actual images.

By: João

João — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:14:25 +0000

If the update to fail in the half of the process, what we gonna do?

By: K20

K20 — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:54:09 +0000

lt – in response to your DST question, here is the Cisco answer for the update in an SCCP environment. I assume that parts of this would work in the SIP world as well.
1) Update the Cisco OS load on the CallManager server (Yes, cisco actually releases it’s own OS versions, so you can’t just use Windoze updates. I guess it’s good because they test everything)
2) Update the CallManager version (Cisco gets UTC from the computer clock to use for time. It converts the UTC to the local date/time with a table entry in the SQL database, so the phones get time from there and not from the server time itself. This only applies to 7940’s and 7960’s, the 7970’s are a bit different, but that’s where the next step comes in)
3) Update the DevicePack – Ver39 (This it the bulk firmware load for all the phones. There is a firmware load that has the new DST information in it for EVERY phone model, since some convert UTC to date/time in the phone itelf. What’s interesting is that the version of firmware for the 7970 that’s included in this pack is not available for individual download yet. The only place I can find it is in this pack).
4) Install CallManager DST Patch – this changes the DST fields in the CallManager’s DST database.

I know this is more related to CallManager and SCCP, but hopefully it will transfer somewhat towards SIP functionality. -k

[WM: Sorry, but none of that works with their SIP firmware. There isn’t a CallManager.]

By: Ward

Ward — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:36:18 +0000

Just a little update that we’re still running SIP70.8-0-3S which seems to be the most stable and reliable SIP firmware that Cisco can produce. And, lo and behold, the web access features have started working. What’s the trick? Well, you set 0 in your config file. That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? No means Yes in Cisco-speak. We’ve written PHP XML scripts that retrieve news and weather reports on the 7970 using our existing Nerd Vittles apps. BUT we don’t plan to share them until Cisco gets their SIP act together. We never want to be accused of doing anything that generated a dime of income for Cisco. Their SIP software for these phones remains the crappiest on the market while their pricing remains the highest of any SIP telephone. Go figure!

By: lt

lt — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 13:25:49 +0000

Any idea how to fix the April to March DST problem for the US time change?

[WM: Here’s what appears to be the Cisco Solution… wait for April.]