Flash A Cisco 7960 To SIP

I have to say it was a painful process…it took me about an hour of tweaking…mostly my own fault…hehe. Most of you guys have seen a Cisco phone at some point. If you’ve ever watched a show on Fox, you most likely have seen one…hehe They make great phones, and not just for CallManager. You can flash these guys from skinny to SIP. The process isn’t that bad once you get the steps down. Here’s what I did.

You will first need two things:

SIP Firmware(Please don’t email me asking for the files, because I can’t help you.)

TFTP Server

DHCP Server *optional*

*Firmware

When choosing your firmware version, reference this matrix. Certain versions of SCCP(skinny) have to be flashed to certain versions of SIP and vice versa. Once you get to the requisite version of SIP or skinny, you can then upgrade as you like.

When you go to download your firmware, the zip will be named something like P0S3-8-12-00.zip. You want to make sure that the package is listed as for 3rd party SIP call control environment. Extract these to a folder somewhere.

*TFTP Server

I used tftpd32. This is a great windows prog that will run a DHCP server, TFTP server, syslog server. Using this, set the files folder to that of the firmware folder we just extracted.

*DHCP Server

This is optional because you can simply set all of this up statically on the phone. I chose to use it. In the DHCP server section of tftpd32, fill out the normal information and add option 66 as the IP of your TFTP server.

*Create Config Files

SEP001111111111.cnf.xml
Grab the MAC address off of the back of you phone and create a file by combining SEP *phones mac* .cnf.xml. The contents should resemble the info below:

<device>
<loadInformation model="IP Phone 7960">P0S3-8-12-00</loadInformation>
</device>

XMLDefault.cnf.xml
This guy will need to be tailored to whatever the firmware matrix page says. The loadInformationX section needs to correspond to your version of SIP. X = version number.

<Default>
  <callManagerGroup>
     <members>
        <member priority="0">
           <callManager>
              <ports>
                 <ethernetPhonePort>2000</ethernetPhonePort>
                 <mgcpPorts>
                    <listen>2427</listen>
                    <keepAlive>2428</keepAlive>
                 </mgcpPorts>
              </ports>
              <processNodeName></processNodeName>
           </callManager>
        </member>
     </members>
  </callManagerGroup>
  <loadInformation8 model="IP Phone 7960">P0S3-8-12-00</loadInformation8>
<authenticationURL></authenticationURL>
 <directoryURL></directoryURL>
 <idleURL></idleURL>
 <informationURL></informationURL>
 <messagesURL></messagesURL>
 <servicesURL></servicesURL>
</Default>

*Loading Image

You will want to watch the log tab on the TFTP server to see which files the phone is requesting. It appears that it requests the file names differently depending on what version it is currently running.

Once you get it all rocking and rolling, you can follow this guide to setup your Asterisk/trixbox. It also contains basic configs for the phones.