Cisco 7940 SIP Phone on HiPath 4000

[donb01]

Does anybody know how to configure a Cisco 7940 series SIP phone to work with a SIP port on a HiPath 4000 v5?

I know the SIP configuration is correct (at least for non-Cisco devices) because the vendor set it up as an example for me to use down the road and we had his laptop running off the port.

Of course this is for the IS department. I told them to get an OpenStage phone because I know how to set it up, but of course they go out and do their own thing and now expect me to make it work. Needless to say it's at the absolute bottom of my priority pile, but I will need to make it work eventually.

The OpenStage 40 on my desk just needed the extension entered in and me to give it the gateway IP for the 4000 and it was done. IS still doesn't have the network setup right for VOIP, but it still works. All the junk in the menus on this Cisco phone leaves me no clue where to put the extension and how to point it at the PBX. Supposedly the Router 1 address is supposed to be the Default Gateway, which I assume is the address of the switch, but this is all brand new to me and I'm totally clueless! Since the switch is on a different network that the IP of the phone it whines when I try to enter a router address that's not in the same subnet....

Thanks.

 

[donb01]

Since it seems nobody here has a clue I'll share what I eventually found out using the OpenStage 40 SIP Administrators Guide - seems the parameter names are fairly standardized except under SIP settings - what Siemens refers to as the "Voice Gateway" IP is what Cisco calls the "Outgoing Dial Proxy" and the "Incoming Proxy". That will get you dial tone, but you must also put a tick mark in the "Register with proxy" box to be able to use the phone.

 

[keyset6]

What do you think of IP telephony so far? I see all these complicated posts just to make a phone work. I can immediatley tell when I'm talking with someone on an ip system, due to the low cell phone type quality. Maybe they're all different, or it's a setting that can be modified. We have Rolm 9751s, Siemens 9006s and 3000s and Avayas that are all TDM. In our enviroment phone moves are not common. We do have a couple IP systems out there where there was new construction, but I haven't worked on them.

I remember before leaving Siemens a few years ago I did work on a few IP systems. Maybe it was the customer's network, but it seemed to take forever for the phone to come up when initialized. Their system was static, so when moving a phone to a different room, 30 feet away sometimes involved changing the default gateway setting in the phone. I noted the time it took to re-program and re-initialize the phone. It would have absolutely been significantly quicker if it was a TDM system and the cross connect was changed. I was never trained on the 4000 but knew enough from the 9006 to setup phones from AMOs and just by fooling around with it. What was nice is this customer had (& still has) a 9751 Mod 70 with a 9006 in between that and the 4000. They were slowly migrating some users to the 4000 so it was good being able to work on it, almost like a lab scenario. Then again. maybe their network complicated things.

I recall broadcast phone messages from the IT dept in a law firm that were in the switchroom phone mailbox. Once or twice a week everyone was asked to log off their PCs for about 5 minutes while they did something to the network, rebooting something, not sure. They could stay on the phone during that time though. I've heard they're going to an IP system (with another company as many have locally). I wonder if along with future broadcast messages like that will also include a note to end any phone calls in progress.

I know this is apples/oranges, but I'll never get rid of my 1A2 phone system at home with a MagicJack line on key #2. Years ago when everyone was in the house and before the kids had cell phones I ran a Redwood with 2 CO lines. That thing used a lot of electricity though. I know it sounds like I embrace cave man technology, but I am looking forward to a possible Cisco phone installation in a building that was damaged and requires re-wiring. I know TDM parts won't be around forever.

 

[donb01]

Well, we just cutover to the 4000 Hybrid system the weekend of 6/4 and the primary function was TDM but I installed IP capability so I can learn about it. So based on that here is my experience thus far.

The system trunking is served by an ISDN PRI with a few copper trunks for backup, and my "voice WAN" building - building connections are DS1 - that is the voice part of it. Our IT department sucks. I have enough of the network set up so I can do the IP, but they still haven't figured out the option 43 stuff for traffic control. Part of the reason for that is the proper way to do option 43 is right in the switch, but they have DHCP being handled by 2 different network servers so the switch has no control over the VLANs (as far as they have figured out so far) - so my results are based on a straight plug the phone into a network port and grab an IP kind of scenario - no QoS whatsoever at this point.

That said, I only bought 2 IP phones - Siemen's Openstage 40s, and the IT department came up with the Cisco SIP phone.

I have one IP phone configured at the PBX location and the other on my desk in a remote site. The SIP phone is at the same site in the IT department. I told them not to rely on it much because when the network gets bogged down the call quality will go right out the window.

When I use the IP phone on my desk the background is so quiet you could hear a pin drop - no noise, no jitter. Voice replication is excellent according to people on the other end, and the bi-directional speakerphone is great. I have no idea how the SIP phone works. I touched it enough to give it dialtone and that's as far as I went.

So this report is only based on 3 phones in the network and none of them are the primary phones for the people who have them. Someday when I get 50 of them on the network I might be able to give an objective answer, but for right now it all works good. The PBX is just like any other PBX - it sits there and does its thing... Except this time around the Germans decided to shuffle the command set a bit and leave a few commands in German even so there is somewhat of a learning curve involved for me....

As far as setup goes, I build the IP phone just like any other phone in the system, except I provide an equipment port number on an IP card instead of a TDM card. Then I just go into the phone and enter the station number and the IP of the IP card in the PBX and it just comes up and works - pretty simple from that perspective - plus I can take it with me to another site if I'm working there and just plug it in. That's a REALLY nice feature - kind of like taking my Vonage box with me to the hotel room when I go on vacation so I don't have to pay for any phone calls )

 

[Bas1234]

Have a look here;

http://www.asteriskguru.com/tutorials/cisco_7960_ip_phone_configuration.html

You need to have the latest firmware, the older ones only work on SCCP (Skinny) if i'm not mistaken.

___________________________________________
It works! Now if only I could remember what I did...

Dain Bramaged
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[RKDavis]

Keyset6 I too noticed a lot of posts in these forms for VoIP for all products. In my experience I see a lot of upfront work to get VoIP working. The original selling point was ease of move, ads or changes to a phone. Now we have unified messaging. I spent many hours on trying to get a pdf file to “fax” to an inbox. To me the two best products were the Rolm 9751 9005 platforms and Siemens 9006 30/80 platforms. We have lost the “0db lose” engineering that was industry standard in all hardware. We now have to choose a codec. We lost control of the network to other services and providers. A customer could buy a TDM system and may have to upgrade once or twice depending on there needs or growth. Now it is a given to upgrade to renew licenses or software fix. All of the customers I work with had to invest in switches for PoE, newer more robust ups systems and more air condition to keep the rooms cooler. Anyway just my 2cents

RKDavis Wilmington,NC

 

[keyset6]

When with Siemens I heard a customer actually installed a physically separate network for ip phones, and as you mentioned the PoE requirement. I'd also put the Rolm 9751 on the top of the list, with Avaya. I had customers migrate from the Rolm to Siemens system and there was a lot of frustration, the 9751 was so much easier to work with. I've heard of more than one 9006 that was actually removed because how routine changes were such a pain, and Unix recoveries required, although I'm referring to older releases. I did like LcWin and the 9006.6.

My company is used to just turning the PBX off during a power upgrade of whatever, the procedure for the Avaya is.. turn it off. In fact just today I was helping someone not familiar with a 9006, went over a lot of commands, examples how you have to deactivate a phone with the last line appearance, no decent monitor function etc. She was like "you've got to be kidding.." But, later 9006 releases were more stable with the backup copy of Unix on the drive. I guess I don't mind working on the 9006 because I'm so familiar with them. But then I'll go to a 9751 or Avaya and can see the big difference. I do wish IBM continued to develop the 9751 all the way to an ip system.

I know faxing can be troublesome with ip, although I sometimes wonder why the technology still exists. Just scan and email the document. But some companies still require faxing only. Our tie lines are voip, I've had luck with faxes by slowing down the machine to 7200 baud. Sounds like upgrades are a routine process on ip systems now. The only upgrade I've done with some of our Avayas is change them from a tape drive to a flash card database. From this point on I don't see why we'd upgrade them or any of the other systems for that matter. Sure, there are neat benefits for some companies with ip, like relocating a phone to a different building within a campus. Now there I'll admit you'd save time over changing cross connections.

 

[donb01]

9006.6 is my favorite release as far as stability goes. Because it now uses a unixware image instead of the old-style boot the whole beast from scratch version you can just dump the power and turn it back on and it will be fine. My only caution is to do the exe-updat to write the switch state in RAM out to the disk before doing so, but even if you don't, all you'll usually lose is a few variable call forwarding settings or any programming changes you made that weren't written to disk. A good switch tech always finishes the session with an exe-updat to write the changes out to disk anyway....

They finally got most of it right with LC-Win4, but there are still a few things you need to have procomm to do like checking the backup status and the like. Some of that stuff can also be done from the web launchpad but still not everything.

On the new 4000 everything is done from the launchpad, and it takes a good hour to configure your browser with all the required certificates and updates and the like to insure a decent experience. There are definitely some cool features in the new OS - the favorite of which I have found is cloning. You can copy a specific station configuration out to notepad and make 10 copies or more if you need them. Change the extension numbers, pen, and the public network number and then tell the switch to process the file like a big macro - *poof* - 10 new phones just like that! Very slick. The really scary thing is if you are used to LC-Win with it's 4 tabs of information and then you go into the new web-assistant tool and see the 200+ parameters you can set for every station it can get quite daunting - the trick is to just clone an existing phone and just change the few details that are different.

Some new technology stuff is cool and some is annoying, but in the long run I think it will make things better for the long run!

 

[keyset6]

That station cloning feature sounds handy, kind of like the Avaya 'dup' feature. I wonder can you now add a DNIT - (I'm talking 9006 language now) with the Launchpad? I remember customers calling me about that since it could only be added in EMML or Direct Amo. I wouldn't charge them to add those, or if they did call in a MAC I'd add a whole bunch for future use. I didn't think that was right it couldn't be added with LcWin.

 

[donb01]

It seems like you can by adding them under "ACD Numbers" but I'm not sure if that actually changes them in the dial plan or not, but it kinda looks like it does. I'm a noob at this, so take it with a grain....

I know how to do it in expert mode just like the old 9006, but that's not the answer tot he question )