[cisco-voip] Odd 7960 rebooting problem

[Jared Mauch]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 08:29:20AM -0500, Peter Grace wrote:
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> Jared,
> 
> The phones are running SIP 4-04-00 --  I tried downgrading the
> software a few releases then upgrading back to 4-04 but the same
> problem persists.  I'm concerned about going to binary-signed 5, since
> someone told me to do that to my last phone (which was having a
> different reboot problem) and it essentially just turned the phone
> into a $350 paperweight.   What is the SIP security stuff from earlier
> this year? :) I was running a previous version of asterisk in CVS, and
> even updated to the latest CVS version, but the problem still happens...

	I believe the signed binaries are to prevent the phone from
becoming a paperweight.  First, it's not like someone else is going to write
software for the phones besides cisco.  Second, since they use TFTP
which is a very easy/insecure protocol for fetching its software/images,
this actually will prevent the loading of a corrupted (ie: non signed)
binary on the phone if your tftp server files are damaged, or if
there is a data corruption problem while fetching the image.

	I would recommend going to 6.0, I've seen no problems with it
in our environment, it fixes a lot of problems that were in the 4.x
series and provides new features that work well with asterisk.
Since the support on the phones is something like $8 /yr, you may
want to look at that.

	As far as the SIP security advisory goes, please
see this: http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2003-06.html

	- Jared

> Jared Mauch wrote:
> | On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 09:25:13PM -0500, Peter Grace wrote:
> |
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> |> Dear Group, ~    I've had two 7960 units connected to my asterisk
> |> system for several months -- everything's been working fine, no
> |> complaints.. Something odd is happening now, though.  Both 7960's
> |> will crash and reboot, about half a second into a call once the
> |> call is officially in progress..  I was wondering that maybe
> |> since I've been fiddling with
> |
> |
> | What software are you running?
> |
> |> my routing tables that possibly I've managed to firewall off rtp
> |> between the phones and the server, but I don't think that's the
> |> case since the sip packets do appear to correctly start the
> |> call...
> |>
> |> Does anyone know why phones would just, out of the blue, after
> |> several months of working fine, synchronously start rebooting?
> |
> |
> | I've never really noticed anything quite like that, are you using
> | the latest asterisk cvs, or 0.5 release ?
> |
> | you are aware and upgraded your devices and asterisk for the sip
> | security stuff earlier this year I presume? :)
> |
> | - Jared
> |
> 
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-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.