Cisco 7960 - How to use custom logo without CallManager

Hey guys,
Trust me, I have been Googling (is that a term?) for over 2 hours now, and I cannot find anything straightforward that tells me how I can upload an image to use an a logo for a 7960 that’s using the SIP firmware. Does anybody here know any way for me to do this? I have the image in a bmp file on a web server already, but I can change the format if needed. Thanks in advance for any information.

-Scotty

I have already read this, and my logo is in /var/www/html of my Asterisk server, but this does absolutely nothing. It just hosts the file. Nothing actually tells the phone “Hey, get the image from here.” It’s kinda just like “Well, nothing is telling me what to do, guess I’ll use that ugly stock Cisco one.” Any advice?

-Scotty

Assuming you follow the steps above and you place your image file in /var/www/html of your PBX server, then this logo is served by the web server built in (the same you are using to go to the freepbx web pages).

You would change the configuration to:

logo_url: “http://192.168.1.5/logo.bmp”;

You need to change the IP address to match your PBX and the name of the image to however you have named the image (case sensitive).

To test, that the logo is in the right place, you can also just type the URL into any web browser and you should see the image.

You can also place the logo on any other web server and enter that URL.

@jfinstrom I apologize, I should have worded my question better. I do not know where to change the configuration. There is no place on the phone itself (that I can find) to do this. Also, a web server for the phone is not enabled, since it appears that I need to use CUCM to enable it. Endpoint Manager will not work to do anything on the phone. I am just having tons of issues trying to add a logo! Thanks for the ongoing support!

-Scotty

The configuration is stored in the TFTP directory. Watch /var/log/messages on the server to see what file(s) the phone is requesting.

Hey,
Thanks for the response @cynjut. I am sad to say that I have absolutely no idea how to do this, as I only really know about hardware, and Windows/OS X are the only OSes I have ever used. Do I need to use WinSCP or something of the like?

Thanks,
Scotty

Log in to the console as ‘root’ using the root password you set when you built the system.

Type the following:

tail -F /var/log/messages

and watch the fun. If there’s too much for you to concentrate on, you can use the ‘grep’ command like this:

tail -F /var/log/messages | grep ‘tftp’

to just see lines with ‘tftp’ in them.

I used tail -F /var/log/messages and then restarted the phone. Nothing new shows up in the console, but the phone did register. It just keeps showing this

Oct 25 19:52:01 raspbx rsyslogd-2007: action 'action 17' suspended, next retry i s Wed Oct 25 19:53:31 2017 [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2007 ]
Any idea what it means? Could that be the issue?

Thanks,
Scotty

Nope - you’ve misconfigured rsyslogd. It’s not important.

If the phone isn’t picking up the config file from TFTP, you’ll have to get into the phone and change the options yourself. The telnet and httpd ports should remain open for about five minutes after you boot the phone.

Here is my list of what I have done with the phone since receiving it.

  1. Plugged it in

  2. Added my SIP accounts manually

  3. Literally nothing else

All I did was plug it in and setup the SIP accounts, nothing else. I do not know if it is connected to a TFTP server, how to program the TFTP server, or if I even have a TFTP server/what the address of it is.

THe Cisco phone you have chosen is one of the most challenging SIP instruments out there, and you haven’t even begun to set up an environment that is conducive to them working. I am a huge fan of Cisco phones, but only in SCCP mode - I’ve tried to use the SIP image a few times and always ended up disappointed.

At this point, I think you have two choices:

  1. Forget about using the SIP image on the Cisco phone and go back to SCCP. The Chan-SCCP-B channel driver (which I’ve written extensively about) provides you with a much less “holding your tongue this way” sort of experience. True, it’s not managed by a friendly GUI so common in FreePBX, but it works and gives you a way to manage features like this.

  2. Forget about using the Cisco phone as a SIP instrument. There are phones that will just connect and work in the $40 range that you can get and not have to go through all of the research you are going to have to do to get the Cisco phones working.

You can continue down with path, but I guarantee you are going to have to do a LOT of research throughout the Internet to get these phones to work the way you want them too. This includes things like patching the source code for Asterisk, building all sorts of config files (that you then have to maintain by hand), and a lot of other custom work. If your time has any value at all, replacing your Cisco phones with something more modern is going to be a huge cost savings.

What phone with a screen that can display a logo is available for under $40?
I have an SPA-303, and that works amazing, but the main feature I need, as ridiculous as it may sound, is the logo.

I am completely willing to switch to a different phone, but chose the 7960 because it could (well, I guess not) have a logo, and it was only $20 on eBay.

I think we already talked about this.

You are trying to solve a very specific problem that requires intimate knowledge of the Asterisk system, Linux in particular, and how the different protocols operate. This is not going to be as easy as “click the checkbox” by any stretch of the imagination. To start, you are going to have to get intimately familiar with XML files and how to serve them up to the phones.

Okay, I understand what you mean. What phone would you recommend? I used to have 3 Yealink T38G but I gave them away before I started with SIP, and I’ve since really wished I hadn’t.

I don’t normally say this, but the Sangoma guys have phones that can do this, are supported in EPM, and you get EPM for free when you buy the phones.

There are some older SIP phones that have graphic displays that might meet your needs. If you are willing to use Cisco, there should be some older Gransstreams or Yealinks that might do what you need.

The setup of the 7960 (at least for a newbie like me) can be very confusing. I assume that you have already gotten the phone working so that means to me that you have already crossed the boundary of getting tftp set up with the telephone configuration files there. When the phone starts up, it looks for a tftp server and loads the configuration from there. One file is called SIPDefault.cnf. It has an entry called, logo_url that has to be set to point to the logo.

Setting the logo_url value sounds easy… but there is more! This setting is a URL so it is not as simple as putting a file on a server and pointing it there. You will have to have a web server running that will serve up the image. Setting up a web server is trivial, if you have some experience; if you don’t, the initial climb is steep.

Once setup, the 7960 is a wonderful phone.

The 79XX Series phones hold a special place in voip adoption. Usually in the journey from proprietary platforms like Cisco, Toshiba etc people need to build an inexpensive proof of concept. They tend to gravitate to the 79XX series because

  1. They look nice
  2. Everyone knows who Cisco is
  3. They are dirt cheap!

Here is the problem, These phones were made to be used on the Cisco platform. The fact they can be flashed over to sip doesn’t mean they should be. You essentially lose half the phone features because You are not using CCM.

You could fill all of the lakes of Minnesota with 79XX tears. People often at this point come to the conclusion that FreePBX/Asterisk/VoIP sucks and give up OR they move on to another phone. Ideally we just glaze over this phase in the game and go to a VoIP phone that is built for this purpose.

Whenever engineering a project professionally or as a hobby my time is always in the price of things. I typically find that any savings are consumed very quickly by labor.

Preach - I’ve found a solution that supports the phones in Skinny mode and I’ve become adept at using it. It’s not a solution for everyone, but it does work for my customers and me. I get the full power of the phone at the desktop, and I can buy the phones by the pound.

The phone is cheap to get because it is NOT easy to use and set up until you add additional resources. I spent the time to understand how the phones work and how the software and interface need to be managed.

This is Just My Opinion (and certainly not that of almost anyone else) but let me reiterate - if you insist on using the Cisco 7940 or 7960, you should use Chan-SCCP-B, set it up the way I documented in the Wiki at that site, and set them up by hand. Using them as a SIP phone is painful, disappointing, and LOTS harder than it needs to be.