[cisco-voip] Peer Firmware Sharing

[Jason Roysdon]

Sorry that this message won't be threaded right.  I just joined the list
so I'm pasting this from the web archive.

The trick is that you need the phones to not upgrade right out of the
box.  But that's the first thing they check on when they hit the TFTP
server ("Do I have the latest version?").  If you were really desperate
to do this, you could set up a temp CUCM server to point the new phones
to that matched the same firmware as the phones.  That's if the phones
all shipped with the same firmware.  They will check with that CUCM
server and see they already have the latest firmware and not upgrade.
Have the phones already BAT'd in with their MAC addresses and the Peer
Firmware Sharing set to on.  Now the phones will all get this setting
enabled, and you can re-home them to the real CUCM TFTP server.

However, I don't think you'd want to do this unless you had a really,
really slow WAN.  The Peer Firmware Sharing only has one "root" phone on
a LAN sharing at a time, and I believe that phone can only share to 5
phones at a time (I cannot find any docs supporting this 5 phone limit,
but I recall hearing this at a Cisco Partner meeting from a badged Cisco
CUCM developer).  That'd run very slow for 200 phones.  I suppose a
trick you could use would be to set up a VLAN for 200 / 6 phones (34
VLANs).  Each VLAN would have one "root" that would download the
software and then share to the other 5.  You could even get a
complicated system going where you upgraded 5, then moved them over to 5
different VLANs.  Keeping the ports shutdown until you had a "root"
ready to move to one of the VLANs would keep the phones from coming up
too soon.  Sounds very convoluted to me (but I love coming up with
elaborate hacks to solve things like this).

If you were going to set up a temp server, you might as well just have
it local and have the latest firmware (even, say, on a laptop in a VM
setting).  Then they can all upgrade right away at 100+mb/s speeds.  You
don't even need a CUCM server to do this, just the right files on a TFTP
server (or even IOS router running CME, but a router cannot support a
huge amount of TFTP upgrades at once either).

Given this silliness to get something like this to work, Cisco should
have designed the Peer option to be more intelligent and have it on by
default - but with it checking to see if it has a 10+mbit connection (or
whatever speed seems reasonable) to the TFTP server first.  If it does
and is able to download that fast, skip trying to download from a peer
and get it from the source.  If not, fall back to selecting a root and
having it download from the TFTP server and share - but then also have
other roots that can handle the load and share to more phones if the
first root is already "full" upgrading 5 phones.

Jason Roysdon.

> So if I'm deploying 200 phones at a brand new site, how to I use this
> feature to speed the deployment of the phones? If the feature is
> disabled by default, then when the phone gets auto registered the
> feature goes away instantly. (since it found its config, with the option
> disabled)
> 
>  
> 
> How would I make the feature enabled by default?