BCM and DHCP

[wilmas]

We have a BCM installed on a Windows 2000 network. The customer gave us a static IP address to assign the BCM. We have installed IP2002 phones on the system but are unable to have the phones sync with the IP address. When we static assign each phone it works great. We have set DHCP on and off in the BCM. It does not matter either way. The phones only seem to work when we static assign the phones.

Is there something I am missing on the network setup or does their network server need to recognize the BCM in any way?

 

[biv343]

Is your 2000 server also providing DHCP services? If so, you'll probably want to use that for DHCP as opposed to the BCM. Either way is valid, but it wouldn't be very fun having two DHCP servers on the LAN, especially if the scopes overlap or have different parameters.

If you set the phones to partial DHCP, the phone will get an IP from DHCP, but you will still need to manually specify the S1 address and S1 port. If you use full DHCP, you will get all info sent to the phone, including the S1 IP and port info. That requires that you configure DHCP option 128 in your DHCP server (unless you are using the BCM's DHCP server).

 

[wilmas]

FOLLOWUP TO ORIGINAL QUESTION. WE FOUND THAT THE WINDOWS 2000 SERVER AND THE BCM NT SERVER ARE NOT COMPATIBLE TO DO DHCP FROM THE SAME NETWORK. ONE NEEDS TO BE STATIC AND THE OTHER CAN BE DHCP. IF YOU COME ACROSS ANY NETWORKS THAT ARE TRUE WINDOWS BASED MAKE YOUR VOIP PHONE STATIC. THEY WILL NOT WORK IN DHCP MODE.

 

[biv343]

That shouldn't have anything to do with why the IP phones aren't working. If you disable DHCP on the BCM, you could run the IP phones in partial DHCP mode, they would get their IP address, subnet mask and default gateway from the Win2K DHCP server, and you would manually enter the S1 address and port info on the IP phone.

You would not want a Windows 2000 server doing DHCP on a LAN and a BCM doing DHCP on the same LAN, unless you are sure that the scopes do not overlap and are provisioned with the same DHCP options. I typically would only use the BCM DHCP server in a "remote office" environment where there is no other choice for DHCP services.

I have countless customers with IP phones in DHCP mode with Windows networks, some with several hundred IP sets (on a CSE, not a BCM). It would be a management nightmare if you had to statically assign and maintain that many IP addresses.

 

[kevinme]

i also havent been able to make this work with a win 2003 server. under dhcp scope set up option 128 Nortel-i2004-A,47.104.51.43:7000,1,1;47.104.51.43:7000,1,1.

where 47.104.51.43 is the ip of published ip on bcm

phones are set up to full dhcp. however the set doesnt ever seem to come up.
dont want partial is customer doesnt want to have to manually do anything to set.
any ideas?

thanks
kevin

 

[Jephph]

If the DHCP Server is on the same logical network as the IP phones and the BCM, then that string should work.
If the DHCP Server is not on the same logical network, then you need to supply Option 003 and make sure that you configured your addressing/masking correctly when you created the remote scope. Also, in this scenario, a device must be set up on the Phone's logical network to forward the DHCP transactions to the DHCP Server. This is referred to as DHCP Relay or sometimes refereed to as "IP Helper".
If you are using pre-defined vendor classes, I have experienced issues with some firmware versions with the terminating character of the phones ID string. Try terminating the string with a "null" (hex 00). I'm not talking about option 128 here, I'm talking about the vendor class ID string. Example is:
4e 6f 72 74 65 6c 2d 69 32 30 30 34 2d 41 00

This translates to:
Nortel-i2004-A (terminated with a null character)