In a second or so, the line buttons start flashing amber. With the phone turned off, press and hold # while inserting power, either via PoE or mains adaptor. Now, reset the phone with the following procedure. runs through the contents of the 7911 directory, and symlinks them to the base tftp directory. Ultimately, to keep everything tidy, I put the 7911 directory into my tftp boot directory, and ran the following for i in 7911/* do ln -s $i. I tried everything, from matching the hardware substring in nf, to symlinking the mac address to the right file. It would be nice if the 7911 would listen to the filename parameter that can be passed from DHCP, but sadly it seems to only be interested in at the base of the tftp directory. The main task here, is to get the 7911 to load the file from the tftp server. For that reason, I’m not going to cover how to set up tftp, as that’s covered a million times over elsewhere on the internet.

I use it for all sorts of netbooting magic. Now, I already have a working tftp server on my network. This allowed it to be ungzipped and untarred into a working directory called 7911. A friend downloaded cmterm-7911_ for me, which I promptly renamed to cmterm-7911_. The phone, as I had it, was configured to use Cisco’s SCCP ‘Skinny’ protocol, and talk to a CallManager server. In this case, Ebay isn’t a partner, so I had to rely on a friend to download the latest SIP compliant firmware for the 7911 for me.

If you didn’t buy it from a partner, then tough luck. Now, we all know that Cisco doesn’t care about end users, and relies on product quality through their channel partners. Recently I purchased a cheap Cisco 7911 phone off of Ebay.

Cisco ip phone 7911g firmware