Cisco KATE

Working on a problem with Cisco SPA525G phones freezing and rebooting. Going through the debugs, I find a bunch of KATE messages. Weird. Some research shows that this is pretty poorly documented. Research also shows that Google sucks if you want to do a case sensitive search, which in this case I definitely do.

After some digging around, it looks like KATE stands for "Keyboard Alphanumeric Text Entry" and deals with Cisco localization settings and etc.

Error Messages:

2010-02-10 08:49:16 Local3.Debug 192.168.1.9 KATE_tftp {
2010-02-10 08:49:16 Local3.Debug 192.168.1.9 KATE_tftpInit {
2010-02-10 08:49:16 Local3.Debug 192.168.1.9 }<010>
2010-02-10 08:49:16 Local3.Debug 192.168.1.9 KATE: finished waiting on EVENT_INIT_CNF_PARSED
2010-02-10 08:49:16 Local3.Debug 192.168.1.9 kate Name: English_United_States/525G-kate.xml

I was only able to find 2 pages in Cisco that defined KATE directly. Both are release guides that mention this in passing.

3.3 No Keyboard Alphanumeric Text Entry Support
3.3.1 Asian Locales
There is currently no localised Keyboard Alphanumeric Text Entry (KATE) support for the following Asian locales:

Chinese (China)
Chinese (Hong Kong)
Chinese (Taiwan)
Japanese (Japan)
Korean (Korea Republic)

The default English (United States) KATE will be presented to the user instead.
3.3.2 Cisco Unified IP Phone 3951"
KATE is not internationalised on this device and therefore cannot be localised. KATE is only used for local administation purposes only.

Source

Another Mention of KATE in another context.

Resetting Cisco Phones Part 2

Reset the phone instead of restarting the phone to be sure it completely reboots.