Hi all this is my first time posting in a forum and this is my first time with freepbx or IP phones in general so I apologize in advance for my shortcomings.
I have an freepbx distro installed version 12.0.1rc35 and EPM running 12.0.0.16
The freepbx distro is located in one subnet of my network and the phones are connected to another subnet with it’s own DHCP.
Now I’ve read that Network Scan won’t help me here because it uses ARP to discover new phones.
My question is, Does Extension Mapping or other tools in EPM uses ARP to locate and configure IP phones as well? Because everytime I try to add an Extension using Extension Mapping it doesn’t show the IP address status
I use EPM to provision our phones which are using a separate network and on a VLAN, Although I use the same DHCP servers for all our networks. The Grandstream phones first get a temporary IP address on the general LAN and download there template which tells them to be in a VLAN, The phones then reboot on that VLAN, get their correct IP address, download their template again, but this time since they are in the correct VLAN they don’t reboot. I haven’t used the network scan in EPM, we enter or bulk import the mac addresses into both the DHCP servers and EPM.
It can certainly manage phones on different subnets.
I think phone discovery relies on scanning the ARP table on the Freepbx server itself and thus will not find phones on any networks that are not directly connected to the subnet the FreePBX server resides on.
My question now is how do you load a phone to EPM? I checked the documentation in freepbx wiki it didn’t mention anything on how to load a phone to EPM.
I would appreciate if someone could please clarify what is the recommended steps to deal with phones on a different subnet using Endpoint Manager. I just read the documentation but does not say anything about that (aside from mentioning that network scan needs to be done on same subnet).
I think I need some better understanding of how the booting process for the phone works. How do I tell the phones when they boot “hey go talk to FreePBX server at IP XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX and it will give you instructions”? I guess this happens automagically when phones are on the same subnet as FreePBX, but maybe this is something that needs to be fixed when on different subnets?
To the best of my knowledge, the phones don’t go find the server themselves even if on the same subnet.
It requires the phones to be configured correctly to find the server, either through a static address assignment or from the DHCP server. The instructions will vary by phone type.
The only part that doesn’t work is the EPM finding the phones (which I have never used anyway).