Digium Phone support - any options?

Distro Discussion & Help
1

I know there are several posts on this topic on the forums. This is a bit of a request and also a warning to others.

My overall question: Would it really be that hard to release an alternate FreePBX Distro that swaps the vanilla Asterisk 1.8 for the one with Digium Phone support?

I have no idea what’s involved in putting together a distro like that - but I’m sure its not for the faint of heart.

If that is not possible is it reasonable for a user to do the swap after an install?

BACKGROUND and WARNING

We just had our first implementation with real IP phones - have always used ATAs or soft phones before.

The “Digium Phone” simple-setup siren sucked us in, so we went with the latest AsteriskNOW distro - it was the only distro to support them. Well the setup of the phones really is simple and slick. The phone finds the server, prompts you for which extension number this is and completes the setup. In a couple of minutes it was done - contacts list populated, special keys set, etc. Nice! But then I’ve never done a Polycom or Cisco configuration - maybe they are not that hard.

On a couple of other systems we had switched from AsteriskNOW 1.7 to the FreePBX distro about 6 months ago.

In that six months I somehow forgot all the nice little things that the FreePBX distro includes - things I’m doing without now, such as:

  • Fail2Ban
  • System Admin (PHP 5.3 issue)
  • iSymphony easy setup
  • …

It’s ashame the FreePBX distro and Digium Phone options appear to be mutually exclusive for now.

Thanks for a great distro.

  • Richard
2

For other people reading this thread, the Aastra 67 series phones do the same thing. When you create an extension in FreePBX it creates a record for the Aastra. When you plug in the Aastra it asks for the station number and VM password. The phone is then auto provisioned. You can log the phone off and go log on at another phone.

WRT the question at hand. I know the developers are going to be hesitant to vet two versions of Aastra. However this is a community effort. If someone would want to own that process I am sure we could include the RPM. In the spec file it would need to remove the other Asterisk.