Don’t be surprised if you see a cute Snoopy image on your Cisco 7800 series IP phones. I faced this issue couple of times in phones which are already deployed and used for a while, and also just after unpacking the brand new phones. In this blog post, I will try to explain what does this mean, and what you can do to recover the phone back to normal operation.
Symptoms
When the phone powers up, Cisco logo appears on boot, then after a while phone screen just displays a cute Snoopy image. Some people may think this is a background image or some kind of screensaver, but actually it is not. At that time the phone freezes and it doesn’t respond to any key press or anything.
Root Cause
Snoopy is the internal code name of Cisco 7800 series IP phones. Seeing a Snoopy on 7800 series IP phones means that the phone didn’t get flashed with the proper firmware during manufacturing or there’s a corrupt firmware in phone’s flash memory.
Recovery Procedure
If you are facing this Snoopy issue with your phones you can basically do the following:
- Try to reset the phone with the procedure shown here.
If the above doesn’t work, try this:
- Configure a DHCP and a TFTP server in your LAN and set Option 66 in DHCP pool configuration to a TFTP server with firmware and a SIP configuration file that points to the firmware. After thet check your DHCP server logs to see if the phone request for an IP address. If you are lucky, phone will have an IP address and try to get it’s firmware.
If these procedures don’t work, that means you can’t do anything to that phone to recover. And if you have a valid Cisco support contract, you can open a TAC case to request for an RMA.