Phone reset issue

Phone reset issue is the most common yet most nasty issue (especially when it's "sporadic" or "intermittent").

Please note the different between reset and re-register.

If the phone lost connection with CUCM, it'll try to re-register. "Lost connection" means, the phone lost three keepalives from CUCM in a row. By default, those keepalives are sent every 30 seconds. You may verified that from "Cisco CallManager" trace. If CUCM sent keepalives but phone didn't receive it, it's usually network issue.

Reset usually happens when IP address on the phone was lost. In that case, the phone need to go through a reset process to acquire a new IP address. This is usually a DHCP (server) problem.

When the DHCP client reaches half-life, it'll try to renew the lease with DHCP server. e.g. If the DHCP lease was 72 hours, the client will try to renew at 36 hours. In normal situation, DHCP server will agree to renew. So the client can keep its IP address.

If DHCP server explicitly refused the renew, DHCP client has to release the IP. This is unusual and probably would be a problem of DHCP server.

On phone console log, you would see something like below:

NOT 08:11:10.854439 DHCP: Restart - delay = 0
NOT 08:11:10.866112 DHCP: Sending Release...
NOT 08:11:10.894059 DHCP: dhcpSendReq: status 0x12300000
NOT 08:11:10.894946 DHCP: Sending Request...
NOT 08:11:10.899614 DHCP: NAK received
NOT 08:11:10.901451 DHCP: clear info - IP = 10.2.16.37, state = 2
NOT 08:11:10.902400 DHCP: Sending Release...

"NAK received" means the DHCP server refused to renew the lease.

Next time, if you got phone reset periodically (say, every 36 hours), check DHCP lease time. If the cycle matches the "half-life", it's most likely DHCH server issue.