Cisco 7970

Preface

LinuxMCE allows the use of many devices as Orbiters. One of them is CISCO 7970. You can use it to make calls and control your home as well. To add a new CISCO 7970 phone and Orbiter you should follow by this simple instruction. Basically I get the information in the LinuxMCE support forum. But I think it's good to accumulate odd posts in one place. If you have some suggestions send me email - stepanov.michael [at] gmail [dot] com or leave a comment.

Preparation

CISCO 7970 phone is plug-in-play device and LinuxMCE adds it automatically when it'll be plugged in the network. But to do it we have to make some preparations. Run an Orbiter. Be sure that no others tasks are there! Check DHCP setting of your phone. It should be something like that: "get IP via DHCP an no alternative servers". Check the range of MAC addresses:

1. Go to Advanced --> Configuration --> Device Template.
2. Chose manufacture CISCO. You should see in the right list at least two models: 7970 and 7960.
3. Press the button 'Show model'.
4. On the opened window check 'Range MAC addresses'. The range contains two big decimal digits. To get correct range for your phone first see its MAC address. MAC address is six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens (-) or colon (:). The first three groups identify a maker. You leave them and fill the rest by 0 and F. For example, if MAC is 00:16:78:CD:01:D8 its range will be 00:16:78:00:00:00 - 00:16:78:FF:FF:FF. After that you should convert those two values into LinuxMCE representation. To do that run a script /usr/pluto/bin/convert_mac and pass the hexadecimal values as parameters:

/usr/pluto/bin/convert_mac 00:16:78:00:00:00
/usr/pluto/bin/convert_mac 00:16:78:FF:FF:FF

1. As result you will get two big decimal digits. Add them to the phone template and store.

There is a possibility to have some problems with phone installation related with its firmware. It should be latest. But I didn't have any problem with existing firmware on my CISCO 7970. But you should bear in mind it. Well, after this preparation you can install your CISCO 7970 in LinuxMCE.

Installation

1. Plug the phone power and network cable. Note if you have two network cards on your core you should plug network cable in the right switch.
2. During boot of the phone after 2-3 minutes you should see on the Orbiter a message about new device with your phone MAC address was detected. You should click by caption "Cisco 7970" below that.
3. After that the phone should be registered with asterisk and you can see a normal CISCO screen.
4. However, it'll take another 2-3 minutes to generate a new Orbiter for CISCO7970.
5. When this operation finishes you'll see a message on the Orbiter screen. Make a quick reload of router (Wizard -- Reboot -- Quick Reload Router. I also rebooted CISCO 7970 because I didn't see anything in the menu Services).
6. Now go to menu Services on CISCO 7970 and chose Orbiter.

Troubleshooting

• Problem: Phone boots successfully but there is no any message on the Orbiter's screen.
• Solution: If the message doesn't appear check MAC addresses range.

Some useful tips

• To reset a Network configuration of CISCO79xx go to menu 'Network Setting' and press the following sequence of buttons:

**#**

• To check network communications between CISCO7970 and CORE run tcpdump on the CORE:

tcpdump -i eth1 [CISCO7970 IP Address]

or to see detailed packets information:

tcpdump -i -vv eth1 [CISCO7970 IP Address]

See also

• CISCO 7970 Orbiter