Grandstream Firmware Update Warning (*sigh*)

[Darren Schreiber]

Hi everyone,
      Just thought I'd post this for anyone struggling with it.

      Obviously there were lots of changes with the upgrade to 4.0, and a bunch of stuff didn't work the same or broke. I think we've worked through most broken items and tickets at this point.

       HOWEVER, a lot of things were ironically FIXED PROPERLY but had a side effect of exposing other defects.

       ONE ITEM IN PARTICULAR we uncovered today that I thought I would share here, because we can't actually "fix" it for you (you have to do it), is for those of you with Grandstream phones.

MODELS: GXP2100/2110/2120/2124/1450/1400/1405/1160/1165/1100/1105

       We now properly update Caller ID in many scenarios where we previously did not. This requires our switch to send an UPDATE packet to your phone. Grandstreams erroneously expect an ACK after the OK for the UPDATE here, which they shouldn't. If they don't get one, they hang up after 20-30 seconds.

      So basically, the noticeable symptom to your user is that when they make phone calls, they last 20-30 seconds and then get disconnected.

      Grandstream fixed this bug in 1.0.6.7 as noted here http://firmware.grandstream.com/Release_Note_GXP116x_GXP14xx_1.0.8.9.pdf  . But some of you are running 1.0.5.58 or earlier. To be fair, those firmwares are REALLY old (May 2014) so you should hopefully NOT be on these firmwares and running something much more recent. But nonetheless, you will now have serious issues if you are not on 1.0.6.7 or higher.

      Please update the firmware on your Grandstream phones. Despite not formally supporting them, they should work, and this issue is resolved with the firmware update.

[Mark Cederloff]

Thanks Darren for this info.

We performed some updates yesterday on several GXP-1450 telephones.

After getting the run around from GS, we finally were able to learn that they only provide the hosted firmware updates for the older phones and not the 21xx series and have no idea when they will.

On the GXP1450 all we needed to do was add firmware.grandstream.com in the Firmware Server Path field and set Upgrade Via HTTP, then rebooted the phone. After +5 minutes it upgraded fine.

For the 21xx phones (before knowing they didn't have a firmware site), we entered the same firmware.grandstream.com and rebooted phone and nothing would happen. No error, no reports, it just didn't do anything. After contacting GS support someone finally told us the info that we had to create our own TFTP site and place files there, which we have.

So, this was a major issue for us and it seems to have a path to resolution, once we update all the phones. 

We are very excited when 2600Hz adds GS auto provisioning..... soon we hope.