Battle with a Grandstream BT200 VOIP Phone
Much hassle trying to upgrade my fairly ancient voip phone which I use in the study connected to the Asterisk PBX. It seemed to have a very early firmware and boot loader version, which no matter how much I tried would not upgrade to Grandstream’s latest and greatest. I troubled their support ticket system for advice, and the persistent reply was that it would work in one go without intermediate versions. Not so. FAIL to Grandstream, I’m afraid.
After much searching I found a site called GrandstreamSucks.com and there were a series of earlier firmwares. I downloaded all I could, then set about seeing what could be done with these; the phone was set to use a local HTTP server for the firmware upgrades, and by this means I could follow the Apache log and see the evidence of the files being sucked up.
From the very early software versions (on my phone it was 1.1.0.5 software / 1.1.0.88 bootloader) you do seem to have to upgrade in stages. From GrandstreamSucks I used firmware 1.1.2.25 which upgraded just fine. I then chose 1.1.4.14 which also upgraded fine. THEN I used the 1.2.2.26 from the real Grandstream site, and that seems to have worked fine as well.
Now all that’s left is to test it all out properly and check the configuration is still right.
