My dad called me today telling me that his IP phone wasn’t working (it’s hooked to my server). Well, he hadn’t restarted the phone in awhile and I had upgraded the firmware on it so that the next time it rebooted it would pull it down. What I hadn’t realized is that the phone’s firmware switched from using active FTP to using passive FTP. My server was setup to allow active FTP (not much to setup), but didn’t handle passive FTP. So after the phone got the firmware (using active FTP), it choked getting its config file via passive FTP. After a bunch of work, I figured this out and fixed my firewall to allow this. That was only part of the problem; the second problem is that I was using a non-standard SIP port (6060) for some reason that I can’t really remember. Either the phone or my dad’s router didn’t like that, so I had to reconfigure the server (Asterisk) to use port 5060 and reconfigure the phone configuration to use port 5060. I think that this got the phone working again, but it took something like 2 hours and got me very annoyed at my dad when it clearly wasn’t his fault.
I’m definitely not cut out for doing IT stuff. Luckily I don’t have to do this all the time or I’d be pulling my hair out.
Thanks!