technology, networking and IP telephony
Posts tagged I2004
Upgrading the i2002 Phone Firmware
0February 7, 2009
We’re preparing to deploying 300+ i2002/i2004 IP telephones over the next few weeks. In preparation for this deployment we decided to upgrade the current IP phone firmware from 0604DBG to 0604DCG. The site has a Nortel Succession 1000M Call Server with 3 Succession Remote Gateway (SRG) 50s providing local PSTN and E-911 services at three remote facilities. We have done this dozens of times in multiple locations and never really had an issue (except when ‘filter-unregistered-frames‘ was left enabled on the switch ports). This time, however, we came across a problem that caused all 12 i2002 IP phones at one remote site to get stuck in a continual loop trying to upgrade. It took us quite sometime to isolate the problem and come up with a solution although a little background is necessary to understand the problem.
It would now appear that my assumption was totally wrong.
The remote site that had the problem never had the ADAC MAC address table updated beyond what is in the default configuration. When the phone booted into BOOTC mode to perform the upgrade it wasn’t sending the necessary LLDP information to the switch so the switch wasn’t adding the voice VLAN to the port. The only problem was that the phone was using the voice VLAN tag and original IP address so while it’s requests made it to the server the phone never recieved an answer because the voice VLAN was not a member of the port that the phone was connected to. Once we added all the MAC addresses to the ADAC table everything starting working properly. Now when the IP phone booted into BOOTC mode ADAC immediately recognized the MAC address and applied the voice VLAN to the switch port allowing the IP phone to communicate with the SRG50 and the Succession 1000M Signaling Server.
no adac mac-range-table adac mac-range-table low-end 00:0a:e4:75:00:00 high-end 00:0a:e4:75:ff:ff adac mac-range-table low-end 00:13:65:00:00:00 high-end 00:13:65:ff:ff:ff adac mac-range-table low-end 00:14:c2:00:00:00 high-end 00:14:c2:ff:ff:ff adac mac-range-table low-end 00:16:ca:00:00:00 high-end 00:16:ca:ff:ff:ff adac mac-range-table low-end 00:17:65:00:00:00 high-end 00:17:65:ff:ff:ff adac mac-range-table low-end 00:18:b0:00:00:00 high-end 00:18:b0:ff:ff:ff adac mac-range-table low-end 00:19:69:00:00:00 high-end 00:19:69:ff:ff:ff adac mac-range-table low-end 00:19:e1:00:00:00 high-end 00:19:e1:ff:ff:ff adac mac-range-table low-end 00:1b:ba:00:00:00 high-end 00:1b:ba:ff:ff:ff adac mac-range-table low-end 00:1e:ca:00:00:00 high-end 00:1e:ca:ff:ff:ff adac mac-range-table low-end 00:22:67:00:00:00 high-end 00:22:67:ff:ff:ff
The short story here is that you need to maintain the ADAC MAC address table if you want to avoid any IP phone firmware upgrade issues.
As a side note you also need to make sure that you disable filter-unregistered-frames on all switch ports.
I’ve inquired with Nortel about this problem but I’m still waiting for a response. It’s quite possible that this issue has already been “discovered” and will be resolved in a future release (or even resolved in this release).
Cheers!
UNIStim Firmware Release 3.1 for Nortel IP phones
0January 5, 2009
We’ve been running on a very old version of firmware for the i2002, i2004, i2007, 1140e and 1150e for sometime now. We initially put a lot of time and effort assisting Nortel with troubleshooting the LLDP/ADAC integration between the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switches and the Nortel IP telephones. We had been running 0604DBG on the i2002 and i2004 models for the past 24 months with great success on about 350+ phones.
We have another large IP phone deployment coming up in the next few months and thought it would be a good time to upgrade prior to deploying potentially another 300+ IP phones.
We’ve just started upgrading our Data Center (our testbed if you will) with the latest firmware.
- 0604DCG for Phase II IP Phones (2001, 2002 & 2004),
- 0621C6H for IP Phone 2007,
- 0623C6J, 0624C6J, 0625C6J and 0627C6J for IP Phone 1110, 1120E, 1140E and 1150E respectively
- 062AC6J for IP Phone 1210, 1220, and 1230
I’m happy to report that everything appears to be working properly. The regular i2002 and i2004 handsets work fine. The 1140e works fine with the Plantronics Bluetooh headset and the 1150es still work fine in our three call centers. We are using LLDP/ADAC with all of our phones as a way to standardize their configuration. We utilize CRQM for Contact Recording and that seemed to work fine along with Contact Center 6.0 when used with the 1150e phones.
We did have one or two problems with the Default PVID changing on the Nortel ERS 5520 switch after the upgrade (power cycle). I initially thought it was related to our previous experiences with ADAC which I discussed in this post. However, this problem only involved the PVID and not the entire VLAN so additional testing will probably be required to try and isolate this issue.
I have yet to test either of the new provisioning options, including the new DHCP option (“Nortel-i2004-B”) or the new “Info Block” files retrieved over TFTP. I talked about the new DHCP options when firmware 2.3 was released back in May 2008. I’m curious if either of these options will help ease the initial configuration of the IP handsets.
You can find the release notes for the Nortel UNIStim Release 3.1 here.
Cheers!
Nortel IP Phones Broadcast Storm Advisory
2December 17, 2008
You’re going to have to read this document for yourself. Somehow its possible for an i2002, i2004, i2007, 1120e, 1140e and 1150e to throw a loop into the network when the devices are powered by external power supplies as opposed to using a PoE (Power Over Ethernet) switch.
As a rule of thumb I enable Spanning Tree with Fast Learning on all our edge switches since the auto MDI-X feature makes it very easy for a user or inattentive network engineer to physically put a loop in the connect by connecting to edge ports with the same patch cable.
Cheers!
Update: Thursday December 18, 2008
I’ve fixed the broken link above… Thanks Bob!
