Okay, file this under: "What the hell happened here?" This weekend, I was upgrading the equipment on an existing customer. We migrated from an MXeII (not server) running 7.0 to an MXeIII (not server) running 7.1
So, while prepping the new equipment to turned on, I decided to speed up some downtime by attempting to preload the latest endpoint software to the phones.
The phone system uses the built in DHCP server to assign options to the phones. So, we set up a separate TFTP server, copied the TFTP server folder from the new software, and moved it to the separate TFTP server.
I then changed the option on the DHCP to point TFTP requests to the separate TFTP server.
I tested by rebooting a few phones, and watched as they found the TFTP server, loaded the new builds, and rebooted with the latest software. The logs on the TFTP server showed the requests were successful, and the phones worked fine.
So, emboldened by this, I updated a few more, and they worked to, and so, ultimately, I did a LOAD IP DEVICE command and updated a hundred at a time. I got 750 phones updated with the latest endpoint software. The whole process took about 15 minutes. Very fast.
Hooray, I thought. Now, when the new system comes online, the endpoints will already be updated, and everything will come on line fairly quickly.
So, ultimately, we turned off the old system, replaced it with the new system, and waited for the phones to come back online....
And watched as they immediately said "New Software, Rebooting".
And so, they rebooted, and then gave the message "TFTP Redirect, please wait". And not one TFTP request ever went to the TFTP server. After waiting for a while, I finally changed the DHCP request to point back to the phone system. And, after about an hour, all the phones came back up, after (once again) going through a load that I though I had already done.
So, what gives? Will the phone system not allow TFTP to go elsewhere after an upgrade? At least this new hardware was faster than the MXeII when it did this (the last time we did an upgrade, it took about 3 hours for all the phones to come back online), but it´s still too slow of a process. I could not even force a phone manually to point to that TFTP server. It dutifully waited its turn until it got its load from the phone system.
Anybody have any success doing this?
