SPA 525G1 and G2 as teleworker phones reboot spontaneously

[John Gawf]

I have two independent cases of SPA525G1 and G2 being used as teleworker phones spontaneously rebooting during calls.  They are running the latest software (7.4.8).  It doesn't happen at any other time, only during phone calls.  The SPA525G1 is my office phone which I use from our remote office and the 525G2 belongs to a customer using it remotely to their UC540.  Both UC540's are running 15.0(1)XA3a.  They typically will reboot at some point during every phone call.  I haven't opened a case on this yet.

[John Gawf]

I rolled back IOS successfully, and it had the 7.4.4 525 Firmware.  I upgraded the phones firmware to 7.4.7 but both of my remote 525G1 and G1 had no softkeys.  Called SBSC and said there is a know problem in User locale for the phones in the latest version, 15.1(2)T2, and that remanant remained from the upgrade.

The bad user local looks like this:

user-locale U5

So the commands to fix the problem are:

config t

telephony-service

no create cnf-files

no user-locale U5 load CME-locale-en_US-English-8.1.2.1.tar

no network-locale U5

user-locale US load CME-locale-en_US-English-8.1.2.1.tar

network-locale US

create cnf-file

ctl-Z

write

Apparently there was a typo in the latest software and  this would cause 7937 Conference phones to now work, but it was affecting the 525Gs as well.

SBSC also recommended staying with 7.4.7 and not going to any 7.4.8 or 7.4.8a and wait for 7.4.9.

One other tip I received from SBSC was if the phone is a teleworker phone, click the teleworker checkbox on the User/Phone configuration as that will improve voice quality.  I don't have it checked for any of my SSL teleworker phones and had some problems with that.

Now I'm back to the original problem of seeing if 7.4.7 fixes the spontaneous reboot problem.  I will keep you posted.

[danplacek]

We have had the same or similar issues at multiple sites for quite some time.

Cisco doesn't care. Their best suggestion is to basically jump from firmware to firmware randomly till it works. (both IOS and phone load)

We have multiple SPA525G cases open with this problem and other freezing/restarting problems. I even have one thats been stuck at level 2 for well over a month. The cisco dev team seems uninterested -- they apparently don't see the problem in their labs -- so it couldn't possibly exist!

The best combination we have found is IOS15.0(1)XA3a and phone load 7.4.7. This seems to fix the issue in *most* cases -- some still persist though. The only other thing I can suggest is something like a SA520 router with an ipsec tunnel -- definetely not as easy(or cheap) as the sslvpn... but it works.

[bjames]

I have been watching these cases for a while, and seems very sad (the support) reminds me of the Linksys days. These are phones!, What if you need to dial 911 and it drops com'on Cisco!

If it seems to be a buffer issue, can you not set auto tune on the buffers or is that already set?

I hope for your customer's sake this gets resolved soon, we are not recommending the 525's and even though they are much more expensive the 79xx series of phones are rock solid, but it's a tough sell.

Keep these threads alive for the rest of us.

Thanks,

Bob James

[renato.guimaraes]

These SSL VPN phones are a major FAIL.  I've been battling issues with these phones since day one when we got them. We were able to iron out a lot of the previous issues with call quality, but now with this spontaneous restarting issue it's just unacceptable. The higher ups aren't liking this situation, especially after spending thousands of dollars on a system that's supposed to work. I feel like they released these things without knowing how the phone will work with SSL.  The phones work just fine in the office using the internal network.

[danplacek]

"The phones work just fine in the office using the internal network."

Its funny you should say that -- we have had some AWFUL issues with SPA525's directly connected to the UC... replacing them with 7900 series phones or SPA504's fixed the issues right away.

Our main issue was 2 phones that would freeze when you picked up a call... the "call timer" would still be going on the screen but the call was dead and none of the buttons worked. It generally took about an hour to get the phones to reboot... if you power cycled the phone it would sit at the cisco logo screen for forever. STAC was completely unable to resolve this issue -- currently Level 2 support has these phones in their possession -- they have been unable to reproduce the problem... so as far as I know the case is being dropped and we just have to eat the cost of 2 new 7975's... with sidecars no less....

On the ssl vpn topic,

Last week STAC gave me a beta firmware to test that is supposed to fix the "refreshing voice components" issue when ssl vpn is in use. Not only did the upgrade not fix it -- it killed the entire system during the upgrade... I had to call the customer and have them power cycle the box. Awsome. (This was after confirming with cisco REPEATEDLY that I could do this over a VPN connection -- the customers location is not geographically near us.) Anyway, on the first call the customer tried on the new firmware the phone reset within the first minute.

I don't understand why Cisco thinks this is OK? How are we supposed to sell this stuff -- I've only been working with Cisco equipment a fairly short time now... but I honestly COULD NOT recommend them to anyone for any reason -- this kind of stuff is simply UNACCEPTABLE for a phone system. It would be one thing is this 525 issue was a standalone issue -- but its not; the UC500 series seems to have an endless supply of bugs.

Sorry for ranting.

[David Trad]

Hi All,

After embarking on a rebuild over the weekend with another user of the Cisco community forums, helping out someone who could do with a friendly person on the other end of the line, I decided to do some trial testing (Spurred on by Michael's dedication, and he himself having this issue) the results were very interesting.

The field result was conducted on 3 SPA-525G2's off our UC-560 system 2 of them located at my home and another one located down the road at a friends house. However the UC-560 was controlling the xDSL connection with the Cisco 857 in Bridge mode (Yes might seem like an overkill with an 857 but there is some method in the madness).

No matter what I tried I could not get the phones to do the spontaneous reboot, but if the modem was not in bridge mode and was routing all the traffic, the phones would do the spontaneous reboot roughly around the 10-15 minute mark, and on ocasion around the 2-3 minute mark, although at times they might have lost some connectivity, I just attributed this to the poor Internet connection I have at home. However in saying that I do notice that using EZ_VPN over SSL VPN is much more stable, I don't know why as I am not a data expert, but the SPA-508G had no issues what so ever, no drop-outs and very few audio drop-outs.

Given that the wife was yelling at me working on the weekend, the tests did not get too far indeepth analysing the traffic moving back and forwards, but the results none-the-less were still interesting.

If anyone has the ability to give this scenario a shot, I would be interested to see the results of it, although I do appreciate that most of these systems are in production and you may not have that opportunity to do it, but still worth a shot posting this and seeing if anyone has the ability to do it.

Cheers,

David.

[renato.guimaraes]

I'm familiar with that thread, in fact we should merge the two if possible.  I'll try to do some testing on my own and let you know.  As for our setup, we have a 50Mbps dedicated fiber connection directly attached to the UC.  It is a shared connection between our main firewall but it doesn't go through it.  We have about 4 users on SSL VPN with SPA525G phones running 7.4.7 firmware. We've been experiencing the same issues with the call drop out, etc.

[Darren DeCroock]

David,

Do you still have this test setup in place?  If so, I would like to have you try one thing to see if the spontaneous reboots stop.

Thank you,

Darren

[renato.guimaraes]

Darren,

  I have a setup in my lab at work with a DSL attached to a basic Netgear wireless router and the SPA525G behind that.  The other end is our UC560 on a 50Mbps dedicated fiber.  I just tested it a few minutes ago, and the phone rebooted after 10 minutes into a call.

[David Trad]

Hi Darren,

No not setup any longer, it turns out that the system ends up in a High CPU loop anyway and system becomes un-responsive, based on secondary tests carried out, I hadn't posted it because I wanted to investigate it further, but since this system is used in our demo room the boss would not be too happy if I continued to kill the system as I hadn't made him aware that I was testing this and would rather not expose this problem to him, anything that sways his mind to go back and sell LG phone systems full time would be VERY BAD for me.

The conclusion is that we are not going to sell the SPA-525G (Both derivatives) as remote handsets with in-built VPN capabilities, we will continue to encourage the clients to purchase a Cisco 857 and use EZ_VPN (IPSEC), simply put IT JUST WORKS and we just cannot afford to throw money at supporting an endless cycle, on top of that looking silly in front of the clients all the time is also not a fun thing.

Given I dont have a LAB specific system to do testing that has potential ramifications, I have to stop, I will do ones that will not bring the system down as I can get away with it, but in this day and age asking for expensive kit to just sit around for testing purposes is getting too hard to get through the budgets, margins are too tight and operating expenses are going up (I miss the old days)...

I badly wanted to help everyone out with this problem, but I have reached certain limits

Cheers,

David.

[renato.guimaraes]

Here's a link to that other post:

https://supportforums.cisco.com/message/3307760#3307760

[renato.guimaraes]

I just got off the phone with Cisco support, they have a non-public update to IOS (T3c) and the ROMMON. I will test it tonight and post the results.

[rcastill]

If you are using firmware version 7.4.8 please try defaulting the phone and putting on 7.4.7 to resolve this issue.  You can do this by simply dragging and dropping the firmware onto the UC540 icon in the topology view via CCA.  Once the firmware is uploaded then simply reboot the phone via CCA by right-clicking on the icon for the phone in topology view and selecting the "reboot" option.  As an additional step, try going through the factory reset process by selecting this on the phone itself and then rebooting.  This is what I prefer to ensure that I am in fact only using the parameters of the 7.4.7 release.

All the best,

Robcast

[danplacek]

Good news!!!

We tried the T3c firmware at a site that was having the "refreshing voice components" problem.... FIXED!

(of course this is after they gave us T3b -- which killed the system, but whos counting...)

[renato.guimaraes]

I've applied the update last night, tested on call for 45 minutes and today one for 1 hour and so far no drops or reboots.

All is well so far.