Carl’s Blog

I took a chance on one of these phones from eBay. I was half expecting that they would be unusable without an Avaya system in place (Communication Manager, SIP Enablement Services (SES) etc.), and that they’d basically be Avaya-only.

As luck would have it, they work just fine with FreeSWITCH. I haven’t set up much though. I just called the FreeSWITCH test IVR on 5000, listened to some music on hold and an echo test from FreeSWITCH hosted on this laptop. I am looking forward to playing with the Exchange integration though.

The Avaya IP Telephone File Server application (MV_IPtel) is pretty horrible, and in the end I didn’t use that. I actually went through all the hassle of loading up a CentOS 5 virtual machine on this old pre-hardware-virtualization Ubuntu laptop, just so I could load up that app, and what a waste of time that was.

So, all that needs to be done is:

Firstly, the phone comes out of the box running H.323 firmware. You need to get into the phone’s settings by pressing # when first prompted. The default password is 27238 (CRAFT).
In there you need to change the signalling from H.323 to SIP with the SIG option. This means that upon the next bootup, when the phone finds the 96xxupgrade.txt script, the script will direct it to download the sip firmware.

While you’re in the phone’s setup, set the “File Server” to the IP address of your web server where you will be putting the firmware & config files. Also set the phones IP address if you’re not running a working DHCP server. The IP address of the file/web server should be settable as a DHCP option, I am not sure of the option number though.

You need to download the latest SIP firmware. As of this writing it is version 2.5. Download the firmware from here. Download the zip file.
While you are there, download the 46xxsettings.txt file, as this will become your configuration file where you will fill in the FreeSWITCH / Asterisk IP address/port, and any other options that interest you. Most options are there but commented out with “##”, so you just un-comment and alter accordingly.

Extract the contents of the firmware zip file, and place it, along with the 46xxsettings.txt file into the root of your web server – the 96xx phones use HTTP, not TFTP.

Edit the 46xxsettings.txt file: un-comment (remove the two ##’s from the beginning of) the SIP_CONTROLLER_LIST line (about line 2829 in my version of the config file), and edit the line according to the IP address and transport type of your SIP server. In my case, I am using plain SIP over TCP on port 5060, so that line looks like this:
SET SIP_CONTROLLER_LIST 192.168.1.1:5060;transport=tcp

Save that file, boot up the phone and let it do its stuff. When the phone asks you to log in, you just enter a valid extension number and password and you’re away. Now, I’d better go and buy some more of these phones before they’re all gone off eBay!