How to hard reset Aastra 6731i/57i SIP phones for use with on-site PBX

We recently purchased half a dozen Aastra 6731i SIP phones and one Aastra 57i (6757i) SIP phone as we are moving into a bigger office and these were a really good deal. We also moved from a hosted PBX solution to something on-premise for the first time. In order to get them working on our network, we needed to adjust the network settings which of course is behind the "Administrator" section of the phone which requires you to enter the password.

The default password for most Aastra's is 22222 but of course, as these are second hand sets, they had set the password to something else. There is no pinhole reset button on these phones like you might see on a home router.

I scoured the Internet for a while, found the user manual for the phones but they only tell you how to do a factory reset, which of course is behind the "Administrator" section as well. To make matters worse, I couldn't even plug in my phones because they came without AC adapters and we had planned to provide Power-over-Ethernet to these phones.

I ended up finding this article: http://www.noahlh.com/blog/2012/03/how-to-hard-reset-an-aastra-6757i57i/ and I can see he felt my pain. My solution is similar to his but I've added some extra detail. You have to put the phone into its emergency ‘web recovery’ mode and reload the firmware from a local FTP/HTTP/etc server.

1) Connect an Ethernet cable from the ‘PC’ port on the phone directly to your local computer.

2) Boot up the phone in Web Recovery mode by holding down the ’1′ and ‘#’ keys during phone boot (hold the keys down and then plug in the power on the phone, or connect a PoE powered ethernet cable).

3) The screen of the phone will show an IP address so set your computer’s IP address to something in the same subnet. For example, if the IP address is 192.168.1.106, then set the IP to something like 192.168.1.107 (or anything else within the 192.168.1.xxx subnet). I do this in the System Preferences > Network Settings section of my Mac. I here-after assume a Mac is being used so adapt your process if you are on another O/S.

4) Get a TFTP or FTP server running locally on your machine. On my Mac, I installed TFTPServer. It creates a folder in /private/ called tftpboot. Ensure you don't forget to turn it on (I felt pretty dumb the first time I went through this).

5) Go to Aastra's website and download the most recent firmware for your phone version. At the time of writing this article, the software downloads page is here.

6) Unzip the file that you download for your phone model and place it in the /private/tftpboot folder. They should be the model number of the phone and have a .st extension.

7) Point your browser at the IP address displayed on the phone and you should be greeted with the Web Recovery screen. It will differ slightly depending on the model of the phone. The screen will look something like this:

8) Enter the filename of the firmware file with its extension but no directory structure. The "TFTP Server"value is the IP address of your local machine that you set in Step 3. Leave the "TFTP Path" value blank unless you created a subfolder within /private/tftpboot directory when you added the firmware file.

9) I can confirm that Step 7 in the article I referenced earlier is correct. I had to press enter as well rather than using the "Download Firmware" button, or it won't work.

10) Once it has completed, you should now have a phone back in default state with an admin password of 22222.