[asterisk-users] Cisco 7970, CTLSEP<mac>.tlv

[Jason Parker]

I just wanted to post this so that it was out there and Googleable.  Hopefully
it will save other people a bit of time.

If you have a Cisco phone (I was testing with a 7970, though presumably it would
affect 7960 and others as well) that is looping trying to fetch the CTL tlv file
- it may be because you are using Debians 'tftpd' (should be
netkit-tftpd...*cough*hey, Debian developers*cough*) package, which is
apparently not RFC 783 (tftp) compliant with "file not found" responses.  The
whopping 18 page RFC states that Error Code should be 0x00,0x01 for "file not
found" errors, but netkit-tftpd returns 0x00,0x00 which is "Not defined" -
causing the phone to ignore it and request the file again a few seconds later.

Solution: Switch to any other tftpd.  The moment I switched to tftpd-hpa or
atftpd, the phone stopped looping, picked up the SEP<mac>.cnf.xml file, and
immediately registered to Asterisk.

Hopefully in the future Debian will rename, remove, or fix this package so it is
no longer the default tftpd.