Cisco and DST…

March 13, 2007 in Commentary, IT, The Truth Hurts, VOIP by datapoohbah | 1 comment

Well, they ‘almost’ got it right. (ignoring the fact that they waited until the last minute like everyone else and grossly underestimated the effort involved in everyone updating)

Most things work, and have the right time. That is unless you have a 797x color phone. You know one of the ‘good’ phones, the expensive ones.

7970 Cisco Screen

If you have one of these, check the time. Is it right?

It probably is because when you did your update you rebooted all of the phones right?

Now reach around back and unplug it (if you are using this powered over Ethernet simply unplug the cable, if you have a power brick, just unplug that).

Let the phone boot up.

What time does your phone say now? Yeah, that’s what I thought, it’s back to the wrong time.

Now simply reset your phone, ‘hit settings, **#**’ and viola!, you’re back to the right time.

So what’s the difference from a ‘powered-off boot’ and a reset/reboot? And why does that screw up the time? Who knows, but it’s stuff like this that drive us absolutely crazy.

  1. stone’s avatar

    stone on March 27, 2007 at 8:34 am

    Polycom phones are the way to go! Tried the Cisco phones and did not like them.

    Here is the fix for the Polycom phones.
    open up the XML config file and change one line.
    tcpIpApp.sntp.daylightSavings.start.month=”3″ tcpIpApp.sntp.daylightSavings.start.date=”11″
    tcpIpApp.sntp.daylightSavings.stop.month=”11″ tcpIpApp.sntp.daylightSavings.stop.date=”4″

    Go to your Cisco PoE switch (6513) and
    interface range gigabitethernet 2/1-48
    power inline never

    wait then
    power inline auto

    exit out and now all your Polycom phones display the correct time.

    The only downside to the Polycom phones is that they are the longest booting of any VoIP phone I have ever touched.