Cisco SPA504G freeze

[markprice9]

We have 7 SPA504G phones recently deployed, connected to an ESW 520 24P PoE switch.

At very random times, a phone will "freeze" such that the screensaver is stuck and the time displayed on it stands still.  Pressing keys on the phone including menu button do not show any results on the screen of the phone.

Oddly, I was able to ping the phone when this happened and also load the web interface in my browser.  The web interface shows the current time on the phone being the same time that is "frozen" on the screensaver.

This doesn't seem to be related to a calling or QOS issue as my phone froze at 6:18am before anyone was in the office.

All phones are running the current latest firmware, 7.4.6

[kustergustavo]

I'm happy to report that all the SPA504G that were having lockup's are no longer having this issue after we upgrade firmware to the last vercion available.

Has been 3 weeks now.

[Steven DiStefano]

What version did you find solved the issue?

[kustergustavo]

Firmware vercion 7.4.7

[stefano.losi]

I have the same problem.

Bought 4 SPA504G.

Upgraded to the latest firmware version 7.4.6

2 of these phones freeze in average once a day. The other 2 phones never had this behaviour, although I think to have configured all 4 the same. But I'll give a deeper check on it, of course.

The behaviour is exactly the same as told by previous posts. Ping and Web interface ok, no key press, no line to PBX. Only way to unlock, unplug the POE cable and re-plug it.

In my case, all 4 phones have 2 attendant consoles connected.

With these phones I experience a very long "Verifying DNS" phase at boot (maybe 30 seconds).

I have also many SPA922 and these boot in few seconds.

[stefano.losi]

If someone solves this issues, plz contact me on skype. My skype id is isolk5

We have 100 phones in production with asterisk in our company.

So we could exchange ideas

[Steven DiStefano]

I did some investigation with the Engineering team.

The comments made by Mark Price regarding random freeze due to a hacker sending SIP traffic and phone freezing due to DNS are the ones that we are familiar with and fixing in the 7.4.7 release (the hacker issue and it will also abide by the TTL for DNS issue). 

Right now the TTL is ignored by the 50x, so the 50x constantly hammers away doing DNS resolution seems to be the cause.  This is in test now.  I dont have an ETA and cant commit a date, but I would guess December timeframe.

Thanks for reporting this and sorry for the issue.

Steve

[markprice9]

Hi Steven,  thanks for the insight.

Do you have any more info on the known problems with regards to DNS?  Even with the phone not honoring TTL and not doing local DNS caching, that shouldn't cause a problem unless DNS lookups aren't 100% reliable from the phone.

[JeffBourgeois5333]

Perhaps there is something to the DNS suggestion.

About 1 week ago, following my last lock-up, I decided to reconfigure my home network on which the SPA504 operates.  Previously, the SPA504 was behind two NAT's.  First NAT was SPA2102 directly output to 2nd NAT, which was WRT54G.  The SPA504 was connected to WRT54G.

Around the time of last lock-up, I was experiencing unusual significant ping jitter and latencies.  My VoIP connections were becoming choppy and degraded.  So, I decided to try splitting up my network and segregating my SPA2102 and SPA504 from my PC's and WRT54G.

I reconfigured as follows:

Connected EZX55W 5-port switch direct to LAN side of ISP cable modem.

Connected SPA2102 to port-1 of switch, and connected WRT54G to port-2 on switch.

Connected SPA504 to SPA2102 LAN port.

Connected PC's to LAN side of WRT-54G.

So now, SPA504 is only behind one NAT, instead of two.

No devices connected to SPA504 Ethernet port, except for administration, temporarily.

Now, for the past week (with new network configuration), I have not had any lock-ups on SPA504.

The jitter and high latency issues are gone.  Call quality seems better.

Once again, I will have to wait more time to see if improved performance (and no lock-ups) is coincidence, or not.

I'm just wondering if fact that SPA504 was initially behind two NAT's vs one had any relevance to lock-up issues (DNS conflicts between NAT-routers?)....

It'll be interesting to see what Engineering team concludes...

[l.dickerson]

I have now corrected this issue. There were two things that were preventing the SPA504G from behaving itself.

Firstly, I changed :

Resync Random Delay : 2

Resync Error Retry Delay : 0

Resync Periodic : 0

Forced Resync Delay : 0

This improved the performance of the phone immensely, but it would still reboot occasionally. (The freezing however, stopped completely)

The second problem appears to have been a desktop gigabit switch. Removing the switch from the network also corrected an issue we were having with the Cisco VPN Client. It was an unmanaged D-Link DGS-1008D. Funnily enough, it appears the switch only causes problems for the SPA-504G and the Cisco VPN Client - every other application and service worked just fine through it.

Either way, the phone has now been behaving without reboot or freeze for three weeks. We're having some niggling problems with our registration to sip2sip.info, however it looks like that problem has been solved by increasing the subscription expiration to 4800 and the register expiry to 3600.

I hope that helps someone out there, somehow.

[Steven DiStefano]

Darn shame the title of your postings in this thread could not say ' D-LINK switch causing SPA504 Freeze' ???

Now thats funny.

[JeffBourgeois5333]

As you can see from my multiple previous postings on this issue, I do not use any D-Link switches in my network.... they are all Linksys and Cisco.  I had multiple lock-ups... none due to D-Link here...

[l.dickerson]

That's fine, the D-Link was causing the phone to reboot, not to freeze.

The freezing was corrected by setting resync to 0 in provisioning. Give that a try.

[JeffBourgeois5333]

I haven't had a lock-up in two weeks, since I reconfigured my network as explained above on Nov. 18.  As well, my SPA504G is not enabled for remote provisioning, just manually provisioned by me.

(If I'm sounding blunt, that not my intention.  I'm just stating my situation in case Cisco support is paying attention to this thread.  It seems clear now that different people with different network configurations are having the same issue with lock-ups - but under different circumstances...) 

[christian]

This is a problem that has been driving me mad, I thought it was just me.

Problem showing on SPA508g and 502g, Random phones on random networks.

I would like to try the 'Rsync' fix, however search as I may, I cant find any reference to these in the web interface, am I missing something? 

[JeffInAlberta]

I upgraded to firmware 7.4.9c a few months ago and have not had any lockups since.