Setting up Cisco 7945g ip phone on freepbx (beginner)

This is my first ip phone setup and i have Cisco 7945g ip phones available out of the lot that I have…
These seem to be the only ones that I can upgrade or unlock according to posts I’ve seen online.
I have both sccp and sip firmware download and
Appear to have successfully upgraded them with the sccp to some extent - there is a color blue screen saying - configuring ip - is as far as I get now…
I’m running freepbx on a Synology ds918 box as a virtual machine and it’s been running great so far and configured as far as I was able to get on it.
I signed up for a sip account trial earlier in the process and had the phones pulling ip just see if they worked.
My sip trial has run out right after I figured out how to actually upgrade the phones which is where I am now…
Do I need the sip just for the phones to even come up or is it just I have them flashed to sccp instead of sip ?
The sip menu saids that the server is not running and
Not available ?
I was running a tftp server on computer to do the upgrading with Config files so that’s a no brained now so just not sure how to proceed ?
I have 7945 and 7942 phones and 7940 and 7911 I think… these came from a recycling place that was tossing them out along with a couple of vonage polycom phones which appear to be locked…
I have a Cisco rank mount Poe switch running the phones as well as a small 8 port Poe switch I was using initially…
I have - system admin - extension endpoint manager- and maybe another module installed on the freepbx and tried configuring phones earlier on when my sip trial was still running but couldn’t get far cause I couldn’t flash them then…
The firewall in the freepbx keeps saying it has an issue maybe because It’s running behind several routers but other than that the Synology is running dhcp for the freepbx and the phones were initially all pulling ip’s but now nothing… only pulling ip’s from my primary router and the Synology nor the freepbx box are not seeing the phones at all…
I’m primarily windows user here with only basic Unix background and have been struggling along with that…
I have several Macs for emergency purposes but that’s about it…
I see many mentions of asterisks for the Synology online as well as in the freepbx menu but my knowledge of Unix is not that good as I mentioned.
So how do I setup these phones ?
Should I upgrade or flash to sip ?
Do I need to have a running sip server ?

Go on ebay and spend $30 on a SPA504G and save yourself a ton of headache and hassle.

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Load the Chan-SCCP-B Channel driver, leave the phone in Skinny mode. and use the FreePBX Manager to manage the phone.

I wrote the instructions on how to do it and lots of people have tried it. Once you get it going, it’s as easy as anything you’ll try. Interesting new success with Chan-SCCP-B and SCCP-Manager (both from GitHub) just follow the instructions and you should be fine.

Now, having said that, I’m going to be out-of-pocket for the next few weeks, so if you need help post back here and hopefully someone will help you out.

Ok sounds great but do I need a sipp server to get the phones up a running, configured, etc… without dial tone…??
Just want to at least get the phones talking to the freepbx box before deciding to spend anymore money on the project…

Thanks

Ok thanks for the tip but how would I set that up and what’s the difference between that and the phones that I currently have ?
I still don’t have a cucm manager to configure any of my Cisco phones so what do I do ??

Thanks

First pressing problem at the moment… the freepbx box or Synology box is not seeing any of my phones…

I’m running freepbx latest bistro on a Synology box as a virtual machine, so far so good…
During the initial setup I installed the 14 day sipp trial and running tftp and 2nd dhcp server on my Synology box… phones appeared to be pulling ip’s at that time I thought…

Since I ran a temporary tftp server on my windows 10 computer to help configure my Cisco phones, I ended up corrupting the network on my windows 10 computer and had to undo everything and perform a network reset to fix it…

Now, I picked a different computer for my tftp and dhcp server again to configure the phones from sccp to sipp but this time I ran the portable tftp server and did not install it like I did the first time…

Everything looked fine and the phones took the upgrade… I booted up the freepbx running as a virtual machine on my Synology box, then turned the tftp and the dhcp servers back on on the Synology box as well but now the phones are defaulting to my primary internet router as both tftp and dhcp servers and not even seeing my Synology box or the freepbx box running tftp and secondary dhcp server…??

So what happened to my phones that were pulling ip’s before from my Synology box and freepbx box ??

The only difference now is that I don’t have a sipp server running since the trial ended and I deleted the original phone extension configurations since the freepbx box had a different IP address now…

So what am I missing ??

My primary internet router only does dhcp and doesn’t have a tftp server but yet the Cisco phones default to it as I verified in the network settings in the phones…

The phones just sit there saying “configuring ip” and pull ip’s from my primary internet router...

In addition, I loaded the firmware files for the Cisco phones in the Synology box in the folder specified for tftp and of course still nothing…, is that where the firmware and Config files go ??

My Unix is very rusty here and I have seen mention of a tftp folder in the freepbx box in reading other posts elsewhere…

In - system admin - in the freepbx box, the dhcp and tftp servers refer to different servers in my network but don’t indicate which ones and I didn’t see any place to change or modify, could this be the root of my problem since the IP address of the freepbx box changed since the last time I had everything seemingly up and running with a temporary sipp server which is now gone ??

What is sipp?

This is not the way to start out… get familiar by reading the wiki.freepbx.org and watching FreePBX-related videos on YouTube. Here is a whole series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1fn6oC5ndU8tezrQ1pnPSEpa_m0w8LOW Follow along and set up a demo FreePBX just as shown. Do not dive in head first with this mess of tech you have described.

Wow this is awesome !!! Been looking all over for videos like that…

I’ve been thru the wiki a couple of times already and still ended up here… and without a functional sipp server until I decide that I need one just to be able to test my phones…

But my main problem is still how to get my phones to pull dhcp and tftp from my Synology and freepbx boxes like it appeared to do when I started this whole mess ??

I have an Asus router as my main running dual wan connections of AT&T and Xfinity…

The dual wan is the only change since I started all of this and don’t think that is causing my problem.

Forget the 7945g phones for now; start with a softphone or a straightforward phone like the SPA which doesn’t require extra DHCP configuration or TFTP. If you’re going to keep pressing on this question, the only thing I can say is that configuration of DHCP/TFTP are outside of the scope of FreePBX so maybe someone will guide you through it but I would recommend figuring that out from other sources and then come back here when you are ready to configure FreePBX.

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Great answer !! That’s what I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me…
I can do SPA or softphone…

Thanks

Ok I’m back… figured out why dhcp wasn’t working…
Got some SPA phones now and my system sees them right off the bat but I haven’t set them up yet…

Been watching the recommended YouTube videos and things made sense but I came to a screeching halt when I hit another stumbling block…

I discovered another problem preventing me from preceeding, can’t access the mail in the freepbx mail queue… 80 or 800 messages at the moment…

I called myself setting everything up including mail in the beginning but it doesn’t work as I found out.

Was using Gmail smtp as I’ve done before but it didn’t work here… then I switched to the builtin internal, and still nothing…

Barely any straight forward YouTube videos on the topic at all but I haven’t done a web search on the topic yet…

Any ideas ??

Thanks

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