Monday, January 22, 2018

Cisco 7960 SIP Phone

I bought a Cisco 7960 IP phone (preloaded with SIP firmware) to connect with my experimental asterisk server running on a Raspberry Pi. Setting it up wasn't that hard, once I stopped following the bad advice that abounded on Google search results. I'm partially documenting my own experience here - not to help, but to hinder. You don't need a TFTP server (and therefore you don't need to set any hard-to-reach DHCP options) to distribute configuration files, you can do everything you need through the phone's keypad. If you're going to make changes, you need to perform the "Unlock Configuration" steps each time.

Unlock the Configuration

  1. Press Settings
  2. Scroll down to 9: Unlock
  3. Enter the password "cisco"

Set the TFTP server IP address manually

  1. Press Settings
  2. Scroll down to 3: Network Configuration
  3. Scroll down to TFTP Server
  4. Press Edit
  5. Enter the IP address of the TFTP server

Configure SIP on the Phone

  1. Press Settings
  2. Scroll down to SIP Configuration
  3. Select the line you want to edit
  4. Confirm the following entries exist (or add them) [They should match what you've got setup in sip.config on the Asterisk server).

Setup SIP on the Asterisk Server

  1. Add a new block to sip.conf. Make sure the extension and secret match the values you provided when configuring SIP on the phone. [1234] context=home secret=secret etc.
  2. Add a dialplan rule or two to extensions.conf. Make sure the context in sip.conf matches the section name in extensions.conf. exten => 1234,1,Dial(SIP/1234)
  3. asterisk -r then sip reload and dialplan reload