~/blog » Uncategorized

The Mystery of the Disappearing Polycom Idle Logo

daniel — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:33:15 +0000

I occasionally have to support customers running very old Polycom SoundPoint IP firmware releases. One of these customers has their company logo installed on their phones as an idle display bitmap (eg. centrally provisioned phone wallpaper). After a recent firmware upgrade at this customer, the logo disappeared, and it took several hours and a fair bit of cursing before we finally found that Polycom had subtly changed the config file syntax.

Assuming that your had your Polycom-related files in a directory of your TFTP server called “polycom”, and under that you had a directory called “bmp” containing your idle display logos, you would need this in your config, to instruct the phone to download the specified logo:

And then for firmware revisions 3.0.2 or earlier, the following:

But… if you run firmware revision 3.0.3 or later (excluding the modern 3.3.x series, which uses a totally different system for background logos):

Note that the path has been removed from the attribute in the IDLE_DISPLAY tag. Also note that in both cases, the filename extension is not specified – it is assumed to be .bmp (this catches out a lot of people too, it seems).

Fortunately, Polycom seems to have come to their senses a little bit, and removed this multi-frame, animated idle display feature in 3.3.x series firmware, and made it a lot simpler to use. With the 3.3.x firmware you can simply do something like this:

Blog updates

daniel — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 11:57:06 +0000

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here. That’s ok, I’m not a hardcore blogger, and my life does not revolve around writing stuff for other people to read and comment on. I have however just installed a reCAPTCHA plugin for new user registration here, after growing tired of bogus user registrations from bots. I’ve cleaned up a lot of the half-completed registrations (the ones that never responded to the confirmation generated), so I apologise if I have accidentally deleted your account. Please do re-register if that is the case.

I also fixed a problem with the .htaccess file that was preventing mod_rewrite from working as it should, and making some pages unreachable. I promise to keep a closer watch on things in future, and (shock horror) maybe actually write posts a bit more frequently.

First post!

daniel — Fri, 05 May 2006 03:05:09 +0000

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get my own blog. What kind of a lazy geek am I?

I’ve finally started on studying for my CCNP, five years after passing my CCNA. What a slob. The first exam I’m doing is BCMSN, and I’ve never read so much guff about spanning tree in my life. Quite a large chunk of what is in the study guide is rapidly becoming obsolete and superceded by newer (and standards-based, instead of Cisco proprietary) technologies. Hopefully Cisco don’t update the exams half way through me studying for them.