Awhile ago I had purchased two Cisco 7905G phones with with SIP firmware seperately. Before I knew how to configure TFTP correctly, I was able to upgrade the firmware from SCCP to SIP. However I didn't set a default password for the phone. Since then, I have all my Cisco 7912G phones setup correctly and no trouble.. However, for my two 7905g phones, I'm stuck.

The trouble is although I can get the phones to register, I can't make any changes to a lot of features. One I really need to change is the audio mode to disable comfort noise. The delima I'm in is in order to make the change via the web, you need to have a password assigned to the phone. In order to have a password assigned, you need to configure it though TFTP. Since I didn't configure the TFTP or the password at firmware upgrade time, I have no way to change the password and even though the phone is setup to use TFTP, it doesn't have an address nor a softkey to allow me to add one.

I've tried restoring to factory defaults and change between DHCP/STATIC and no luck. The TFTP server is on the same server as the sip server so I was hoping it'd find it somehow but no such luck.

Does anyone know if it is possible to configure TFTP without a password on the phone? And if so, how would you do it if the soft key to add the IP address doesn't display. Thanks!

- Joe

Hi Joe,

I do not have experience with Cisco Phones but have worked on Avaya products.

From that experience (and some with thin clients etc), I think you can push the tftp address using the dhcp server.

In the dhcp server you need to define the tftp address in option 66/67. This will cause the phone to look for the config files etc in the tftp server on bootup. There should be a default config file name which the phone would look for and load on bootup.

This makes sense if you think about hundereds of IP/SIP phones that an organization may need to install. They would not like to configure each phone. Dhcp would be used to push tftp address and the tftp server would have default firmware and config file

Let me know if this helps or else I will dig deeper and get something for you.

Thank you very much for the reply. Your suggestion worked perfect! Granted initially I was using a linksys router for DHCP, I had put in an extra NIC card in my linux box, setup a dhcp server and added the options you mentioned and the phones booted up with the configs I created no problem!

This was my first time setting up a linux DHCP server, but for anone else that may run across this, this is what I did. There may be another way, but this is what I did to get it to work.

dhcpd.conf

Glad it worked. I knew Cisco would think about a large scale deployment option on the phones. It always does