DHCP issue with 7961 phones?

tom.brockman · ‎06-15-2007

We recently purchased several 7961G SCCP phones. After having some difficulties getting the phones to register, I found a posting on this forum indicating that we should set these up in Call Manager as 7961 not 7961G (we are on Call Manager 3.3(5) sr2). This worked and the 7961 phones were able to register.

We soon found that nearly all of these new phones were not able to successfully obtain a DHCP lease (a 2851 router is serving as the DHCP server). The phone status says "DHCP timeout" and no address or other config info is ever downloaded.

Strangely, a few of the 7961s have not had this problem, all of our existing phones (7960 and 7970) have not had any problems either. DHCP is running and has been restarted.

The 7961 will work fine if the IP info is manually configured. So, it seems that either the phone is not sending out a DHCP request or is not receiving the offer from the server.

Has anyone heard of any issues with this model?

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

paolo bevilacqua · ‎06-15-2007

I think you phones need fresh firmware and factory reset. Download the latest recommended firmware for 7961 and your CCM version (I'm not really sure which one, sorry) and make sure all the files are in the TFTP directory. Restart tftp.

Then the reset sequence:

Power off.

Press and hold # while powering on.

Wait for the lights to flash in pattern.

Release #

Press in sequence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 * 0 #.

The phone will reset, get an IP address via DHCP, will download term61.default.loads and other files from TFTP server, then reset again.

hope this helps, please rate post if it does!