Which DHCP vendor option are you using? Nortel-i2004-A or Nortel-i2004-B? The 2000 series IP phones have an issue with the maximum length of the string whereas the 1100 series don’t have that issue.

The problem was documented somewhere… where now I can’t remember.

Good Luck!

Sorry I missed your post. If the IP phone hangs at “Starting DHCP…” then there is a problem with either your switch configuration or your DHCP configuration. I would suggest you manually configure the IP address of the IP phone to start with. That will help you confirm you have IP connectivity, after that you can work on figuring out what’s happening with your DHCP requests assuming that the IP phone works with a static IP address.

Good Luck!

We are getting parse errors on 2004 sets but not 1140′s. Any thoughts ? Thanks.

Matt

I am trying to get a Nortel 1140e working with a Juniper Netscreen SSG5, i am hitting the wall at the “starting DHCP” error message.

Have you ever had eny experience with the this type of setup and do you have any advice?

Stuart

As Gord mentions above Avaya (formerly Nortel) has a number of ways you can configure/provision their IP phones these days.

I would recommend you review the IP Telephony Deployment Technical Configuration Guide for all the options.

http://support.avaya.com/css/P8/documents/100123695

I personally using LLDP-MED with the Nortel-i2004-A DHCP option string successfully with thousands of IP phones. I’ve researched the Nortel-i2004-B DHCP option string and the TFTP/HTTP provisioning but I haven’t found the time so need to make any changes.

Good Luck!

Do you know of any detailed lists that can tell me the DHCP options available to me?

You can use DHCP for everything include the voice VLAN assignment if you wish… it really comes down to the path of least resistance. If you only have 10 IP phones to setup it might be easier to just hard configure those 10 IP phones with the voice VLAN ID and then utilize DHCP to assign the S1 information. If have 150 IP phones then you might want to try and configuration everything centrally. If your switch equipment supports LLDP-MED you can also look at using that to assign the voice VLAN ID.

Good Luck!

Excellent post. Thank you!

We are new to VoIP at my office and I have some questions. Is it realistic to think that I can have DHCP supply all the options my IP phones will need? Or can DHCP only supply the Signaling Server info, and everything else will need to be setup manually (i.e., Enabling Voice 802.1Q, setting Voice VLAN, Enabling Data VLAN, setting Data VLAN)?

We have Nortel 1140Es.

Thanks!