I’ve been trying to find why the phone here in Switzerland didn’t work anymore with my asterisk PBX. After 5 minutes I noticed it wasn’t registering correctly, and it seemed to be due to an authentication failure (401 Not Authorized). Err, I didn’t change the phone config nor the asterisk config…. perhaps I upgraded asterisk some time ago, I don’t know (was there a security issue or something?) — in any case, after a LOT of tinkering, I changed the secrets to md5secrets and it all magically started working again. WTF.

Just a note to myself (and perhaps even useful for others): Cisco phones (at least 7940/7960) can be rebooted by pressing * + 6 + Settings so you don’t have to go and yank out the power supply every time you want to reboot (telnet in and type reboot is also an option ofcourse, but requires you to know the ip address and the password).

 Also, the 7905G seems to be quite cheap and quite good! Seems to be priced at the same level as a budgetone thingy, so if I can choose between that or a nice cisco… I think I know! So if you have any 7905’s to spare… 😉