Solved T54W firmware updates inconsistently work

[vanilla87]

I have two businesses (my own at home and one at an office I manage) that both have Yealink T54W. My customer gave me a spare one of his so I can do testing at home on my own before rolling updates and such to his. When I'm going to do something, I do it on mine (which I have at home) and make sure everything runs smoothly before I do the business side.

For my home network, my 3CX Pi wants to update the firmware from 96.84.0.35 to 96.86.0.72. It does offer a firmware for BENELUX customers but as I don't have BENELUX it clearly doesn't apply.

I tell it to update, and on the phone it says its upgrading, then stops at 82%. I've power cycled the phone a few times and retried, and always stops at 82%. I've left it like that overnight and still nothing.

The phone is on the same subnet as the 3CX Pi, and I can confirm that the Pi is fully updated.

However now the behavior has changed. Now, the phone boots up, all is fine for about a minute, then it starts trying to upgrade again. Thankfully, as this phone is "for looks", its not a big deal for it to have a problem.

But I'm now really suspicious because I've always had issues with updating phones. Sometimes they finish, sometimes they don't, etc. Last time I did a bunch of phone upgrades (March 2022) it did not go well and 50% of the phones required a factory reset (and some required multiple factory resets and resetups and eventually took the firmware). The firmware upgrades just seem very inconsistent to actually succeed.

As I'm the networking person AND the phone person, regardless of whether it's a problem with the PBX or a problem with the network, it's on me to fix it.

How can I troubleshoot this issue in more detail? Normally I'd try to do a tcpdump (which I may do on the Pi) and see what is going on, but to be honest, I'm not sure what ports should be used, etc so I don't think I'd even be able to identify when things go badly except "hey, phone stopped responding". But that's not diagnostically valid unless I know that the phone should have said something back to the 3CX.

As my customer's phones are scattered across the world, firmware updates failing at 50% (or more) is a real problem.

Any advice? From an hour or two of reading online, people say "factory reset and resetup the phones" a lot. That's really not a great solution as these phones are all over the place, and the people using them are not IT people. I need to surgically determine what the failure is, and correct it.

 

[JohnS_3CX]

This is not a simple solution (and may not be a networking issue at all), especially when the firmware is older than a couple of versions like in your case.

1. You will need to acquire the older versions from the manufacturer's website and manually install them one by one until you reach the version just previous to the one 3CX supports.

2. When this has been achieved, you can install the final version from the 3CX management console, but not before.

3. In addition, some the T5 series had an issue where they could not be upgraded or would get stuck in a loop (different hardware revisions) and Yealink had provided a solution for those cases: https://support.yealink.com/en/portal/knowledge/show?id=612b5fcd8c4dcd0723922195

PS: The Benelux firmware only appeared because you enabled the "Allow alternative firmware" option. This is not needed if you are not a Benelux customer and should be removed.

 

[vanilla87]

So I did some stuff today...

1. The issue doesn't appear to be networking. All of my phones are now on the current firmware at both locations.
2. I had to go find the old firmwares and do several upgrades. In my case:

From the WebGUI of the phone itself:

96.84.0.35 -> 96.84.0.95
96.84.0.95 -> 96.84.0.125
96.84.0.125 -> 96.85.0.5

Did through 3CX because it was the last firmware to be released and would make the phone "current" as of 8/23/2022.

96.85.0.5 -> 96.86.0.72

It took a few steps, but everything worked and the upgrades went without a hitch.

So now I understand that this is clearly not 3CX's fault. Typically, we setup automatic updates for some situations and have them run at like 2AM on a Saturday morning. Is there a way to have 3CX just update the firmware at some pre-determined time if a firmware update is available?

We have the 3CX Pi already do its own updates as necessary, and this seems like something that should just be automated. We aren't likely to log into the 3CX often enough to catch "every update" as this thing has been rock solid (aside from firmware updates).

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Hello,

I'm glad to hear this was sorted! We automatically check for new firmware and download it, so you will get a red warning when it is out of date if you check the management console every month or so you will not miss it. The deployment is not automatic though, this is not something we are currently looking to change as it has some challenges that could cause more trouble that the convenience would imply.

I think your specific devices had not been updated since 2019 at least, so check your management console once every month or two and if you see the red warning go ahead and deploy the firmware when the phones are idle after hours.