Solved Cannot provision Cisco 7940 phone

[John Bower]

We have a site full of 7940 phones and one of them has lost its provisioning. The extension assigned to it still shows the MAC of the phone in question but the phone itself still shows the provisioning as failed.

We've tried removing the phone from the extension and re-adding, and we've tried power cycling the phone itself. It always connects back to the phone system but isn't able to get its provisioning back.

Has anyone else run into this problem before?

 

[Lee Cramman]

Having messed around with getting 79xx's functioning myself I feel a combination of admiration that you managed to get a whole site working well and pity for the amount of hassle it probably caused you!

As an unsupported solution you're going to struggle a bit for detailed troubleshooting but have you tried a simple factory reset of the affected phone? I would start with that and confirm connectivity between the phone, your DHCP server and your 3CX server.

 

[John Bower]

Unfortunately yes, we started with a regular reboot and moved onto a factory reset, but it just isn't grabbing the provisioning it had before.

I'm tempted to believe I'm just missing some important step in the provisioning process for that type of phone but everything appears to be normal. I'd experiment with some of the working phones but I'm worried that the end result would be two unprovisioned phones.

 

[leejor]

A number of years ago, I played around with a few of these sets (more out of curiosity), making use of this information...

https://www.3cx.com/sip-phones/cisco-7940g-7960g/

I'm sure you must have come across it.
the sets have been packed away for a long time now as i found others that were much easier to work with.
I had a lot of issues getting the sets to download the correct files , but the Pumpkin tftp server always showed what file was being requested and if it was downloaded, which helped in determining what I was initially doing wrong.

 

[Lee Cramman]

Is it possible the phone is simply borked?

 

[John Bower]

Just wanted to close this one out:

We wound up replacing the phone in question with a newer one that's still supported. That one provisioned right away and with much less fuss.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the phone itself, but for some reason it just isn't getting provisioned. We actually tried removing the provisioning from another phone and reapplying it, but it wouldn't take either, so we were left with two unprovisioned phones.

I explained to the client that the old phones weren't supported anymore and that there may have been some update to the phone system itself that makes it less compatible with the 7940 phones, but that the remaining phones should continue to work so long as they don't have to be reprovisioned. The client wasn't pleased, but at this point we've exhausted all other support options.

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

Glad to see the issue has been resolved and thank you for updating the thread with your solution