Auth Fail on New Cisco IP Phones
One of my current joys I keep getting subjected to is the upgrade Auth Fail messages on brand new phones from Cisco. It seems that with the introduction of 8.5.2(SR1) Cisco requires that you know the new signature in order to load the firmware. The only problem is that brand new phones from Cisco are still shipping with 8.3.1 which doesn’t know the new signature. What does this mean? This means if you are running a current version of Communications Manager you are going to have to manually upgrade the firmware to version 8.5.2 and then let it upgrade to the current version on your system otherwise it will be stuck at the original version.
The Fix
NOTE: You have to run a back-leveled version of firmware on the phone first. Installing this version for the first time will override the default device loads for ALL phones. As such make sure to go to “Devices\Device Settings\Device Defaults” and find the model in question taking note of what the load it currently is set to. We need this so after we install the back-leveled version of firmware we can change back the default load to the more recent version already installed.
The first thing you will need to do is go download version 8.5.2 from CCO. Do NOT download the SR1 version as the SR1 version uses the new signature. Once it is download install it on your Communication Manager Cluster and restart the TFTP Service on all your servers that offer TFTP. If you don’t restart the TFTP server the system won’t recognize and offer up the new file we just installed. Once it is installed the default device load for that model will be changed to that version, something liek “SCCP42.8-5-2S”. You will change to change this back to the latest version you have installed on your system otherwise you risk downgrading all of your phones.
Once you have 8.5.2 install on your system and your default device load changed back to the current version simply find the phone in question under “Device\Phones”. Inside the phone configuration is a variable called Phone Load Name. Put the 8.5.2 load name, the value the default device load was automatically changed to, click save and then reset the phone. Once the phone resets it will upgrade to 8.5.2 and re-register with the system. Once it is upgraded to 8.5.2 simply remove the value from Phone Load Name, save and reset the phone again. This time the phone will go ahead and upgrade to the current version.
Long story short, pretty much all Communication Manager systems will need to have 8.5.2 firmware installed for all their phone models and be prepared to manually upgrade to 8.5.2 all new phones on the system.