Is the phone trying to update firmware when it boots? I’ve seen Nortel phones drop back to ‘defaults’ when they get certain types of Firmware update. We don’t use any static addressing at all now, even our test environment is fully DHCP because we have had so many issues with static DHCP. Can’t really suggest a fix for you other than putting a temporary DHCP server on the LAN you are using.
Tftpd32.exe is a good program which can put a DHCP server on your desktop PC or laptop if you need to get around the problem.

Hi Chuck,

I believe they will work, actually yes they will work although that could and probably will change beyond perhaps 7.0 as Avaya moves to a SIP displacing UNIStim as the protocol of choice.

Cheers!

Hi Visu,

I’ve replied to your post on the discussion forums here.

Cheers!

While we try to do the phone firmware upgrade in specific to 1140E Ip-Phones from 0625C3C to 0625C6R the phone tries to pick up the software & goes into reboot after that the phone comes back up & says Start DHCP….

Then after that it keeps hanging after that & does not do anything further i have waited for a while & see that it keeps rebooting after every 4-5mins & does not seem to come up at all.

I have made sure that i have the DHCP scope are set right i have defined options 128 (Nortel-i2004-A) , 191(VLAN-2063.), 224(Nortel-i2004-B) inspite of it the phone does not seem to come up. But when you revert back the firmware from 0625C6R to 0625C3C the phones come up with no issues.

This happens to only Ip-1140E phones only & i have no issues with Ip-1120, 1220 series phones they are all in the current version of 0625C6T.

Yet an another thing that i have noticed in the phone is if i un check the VLan filter setting option in the Ip-1140E phones i am able to upgrade the phone firmware with no issues.

Can you please let me know what would be the default settings for the ip-1140E phones & what are the recommendations to get this issues fixed.

Hi Shogaxx,

There is a “VLAN Fallback to Default” if LLDP-MED fails to provide the proper VLAN information to the phone. I would suggest you Google for “VLAN Fallback to Default VLAN”.

You can also post on the forums; http://forums.networkinfrastructure.info/nortel-ip-telephony/

Cheers!

On C6O firmware if the LLDP fails for some reason, will the phone then try and use DHCP to find its Vlan info?

What if the DHCP scope that responds doesnt contain this info, does it then just use the NO VLAN option and fall into the native vlan for the switchport?

That was three questions technically, sorry.

I didn’t realize that there are different DHCP options if you use the Nortel-i2004B string, I’ll need to look into that.

I re-tested last night using LLDP-MED to assign the VLAN, as opposed to DHCP assigning the VLAN, and the cached IP option worked (although even upgrading the phone the option still doesn’t appear in the configuration menu whenever VOICE VLAN is set to Auto).

I will comment that it took quite some time before the phone actually booted, at least 2 or more minutes.

Cheers!

The Nortel documentation gives a long list of available DHCP options for the Nortel-i2004B and 227 & 230 are amongst them. We can’t use 128 or 191 due to other services on our network that use these options. Using 0625C60 software (and above) I get both the cached IP & auto VLAN options no matter what I select. We turn on the cached IP using a scope setting but I have set this manually as well (just in case!) and it still fails.

I have raised a ticket with Nortel and I will update this page with findings!

Thanks

Hi Rob,

Just a quick note… DHCP options 226 and 227 are Avaya specific options. You should be using DHCP options 191 (VLAN ID) and 128 (S1 & S2).

In any case I tested this today using 0604DCJ on an 2002 IP phone. I found the “Cached IP” option was not visible in the phone configuration once I enabled “Voice VLAN”. With the phone configured for Voice VLAN ID over DHCP I booted the phone up. I then removed the DHCP forwarding/relay configuration on the lab ERS8600 switches. I rebooted the phone and the display returned “DHCP server unavailable”. I re-configured to the phone without Voice VLAN, and then enabled Cached IP. I then reconfigured Voice VLAN over DHCP and the phone now booted up properly. I removed the DHCP forwarding/relay configuration and rebooted the phone. The phone now sits at “Starting DHCP…”.

This would seem to confirm your findings although I’ll be curious to try the later firmware. You might want to try (if you haven’t already) enabling the Cached IP option prior to enabling the Voice VLAN option.

I would suggest you ask your voice reseller to open a ticket with Nortel. I will try to ask around to the few contacts I still have left at Nortel. Please let us know what you find out.

Cheers!

I have also used TFTP provision using option 66 within DHCP and the same still happens. I am guessing that the issue may have something to do with the phone needing to get a data VLAN address first, the PVID for each switch port is set to the data VLAN. However, saying that this shouldn’t really matter if the phone is caching the IP address and the VLAN and if I manually set the VLAN it doesn’t have any problems.

We use 470’s, 5500’s & 4500’s across the estate and we moved away from LLDP-ADAC because I have been told the 470’s didn’t support it so we were using MAC addresses which caused an admin overhead because lots of the phones fell outside the range that Nortel supplied!

Hope that all makes sense.

Rob

Hi Rob,

I’ll guess that you’re using DHCP and option 191 to assign the voice VLAN. If you leave VLAN=AUTO and leave LLDP=NO then the phone will look for DHCP Option 191.

Could you explain how your testing? I’m curious if your testing is including your standby DHCP server and if it’s sending a DHCP NAK which the IP phone might not be expecting.

So if the IP phone sends a DHCP request and receives nothing it should use the cached IP and VLAN if enabled. If the phone sends a DHCP request and receives a DHCP NAK (because the standby server is out of IP addresses) then the phone might not use the cached IP because it received a DHCP NAK.

So this might not help you in your scenario but I might be able to test in my lab if the cached IP and VLAN actually work when there is no DHCP server available.

Cheers!

I am using VLAN=AUTO… the statement at the top of this page (and on the 3.2 bulletin) states..

“Since the Voice VLAN can also be obtained automatically from LLDP, the request to cache the IP address is valid. But also to ensure the phone still operated even if the Voice VLAN ID is being obtained from DHCP as well, if Cached IP is enabled, then the Voice VLAN is cached along with the IP address.”

We had an issue recently when we lost power to the site, when the power came back online the DHCP server had a failure and took a long while to boot… our secondary DHCP server ran out of available addresses so the phones all failed until the primary became available.

Now, we can get around this issue by increasing the size of the scopes on the secondary or having a tertiary but I believe the phones should use their cached IP and VLAN information… it seems quite simple to me.

Rob

Hi Rob,

You might want to post specific problems in the discussion forums; http://forums.networkinfrastructure.info/nortel-ip-telephony/

With that said how are you assigning the voice VLAN?

Are you using DHCP to assign the voice VLAN ID or are you using LLDP-MED/ADAC to assign the voice VLAN ID from the Ethernet switch.

If you configure VOICE VLAN=AUTO I believe the phone removes the CACHED IP = YES/NO from the configuration options. If you are using LLDP-MED I believe the caching feature still works although I’m not exactly sure.

In my 6 years of using VoIP I’ve never had an issue with our DHCP server (VitalQIP) that caused a service interruption to our IP phones. If you are concerned about your DHCP server there are options out there that provide DHCP services in a high-availability configuration.

Good Luck!

If I manually assign the VLAN information then the phone works fine using it’s cached IP.

I was under the impression that 3.2 fixed the cached IP issues by caching the VLAN information too?!

I have tried the 3.4 version but that does the same.

Any ideas!?

Rob

I have not yet loaded 0625C60 on any of my Signaling Servers so I haven’t done any testing as of yet. We use both LLDP (VLAN and QoS assignment) and DHCP (IP address and S1 & S2 information) on all of our i2002/i2004, 1140e and 1150e phones. I would be very surprised if this feature didn’t work. Perhaps your confusing some of the options. You can’t use LLDP and DHCP for VLAN assignment, it’s either one or the other. LLDP-MED will provide the phone the voice VLAN ID and then the phone will make a DHCP request in that VLAN looking for DHCP Option 128 if the phone is configured for Full DHCP.

You can’t using DHCP Option 191 in combination with LLDP because they are redundant.

If you look at this post the options should be similar although there are a few new options.

A few references;
http://blog.michaelfmcnamara.com/2007/10/nortel-i2002i2004-internet-telephone/
http://blog.michaelfmcnamara.com/2007/10/dhcp-options-voip/
http://blog.michaelfmcnamara.com/2007/10/dhcp-options-voip-part-2/
http://blog.michaelfmcnamara.com/2007/10/nortel-ers-5520-pwr-switch/

Let me know how you make out… I’ll try to load the new firmware just to confirm that it works properly.

Thanks for the comment!

We are preparing for a firmwareupgrade on our 1140e to C6O. During testing the stuff, we see that with lldp enabled the dhcp config will be ignored. We want to configure the phone with dhcp in combination with lldp. In previous releases it works ok. It seems a bug or maybe a side effect of combination of configurations
Do you have experience with this firmware ?

Gr. Frans

I believe you’re referring to the new info block capability. Unfortunately I haven’t yet tested this myself although I’m still running release 4.5.

You may have better luck posting in the Tek-Tips forum; http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=798

Good Luck!

I’m curious if there are people who has experience with the I200x serie and TFTP server for using to connect a phone to the CS1000 Release 5.5 based on a list with MAC adresses and node?

I will be testing the rest tommorow.