EPM on the D series - current state

Commercial Modules
1

Some remarks on the current state of EPM on the Digium D range, in particular the D50

  • EPM as a whole broken unless you set the Asterisk SIP port to 5060
  • Logo upload is broken
  • Intercom/paging still seems broken
  • BLF differs to DPMA. With EPM you seem to get a green light if a contact is present
  • A lot less feature rich than DPMA - for example visual voicemail doesn’t seem to work, and the ‘call park’ option isn’t there on the phone’s display. Might work as a feature code??
  • Setting the side car presents DOES work in EPM whereas it doesn’t in DPMA??
  • Firmware ‘update’ sort of works in EPM but it downgrades the phone, completely broken on DPMA

I’ve made lots of other posts recently about the various problems I’m encountering with DPMA and EPM - feel free to have a browse of my recent posts if anyone at Sangoma is interested in working with me to make the user experience a whole lot better than it is now! :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

2

I have a D50 sitting in front of me, provisioned with EPM ver. 14.0.13 and Phone Apps ver. 14.0.13:

  • registration to non-5060 works as expected
  • background image works as expected
  • intercom works as expected, didn’t test paging
  • Voicemail Phone App works as expected - don’t see a way to map VM button to Phone App
  • parking Phone App works as expected. You must add the Phone App park button yourself, it’s not configured automatically.
  • Firmware management works fine, but the default (recommended) firmware is old. You can upgrade to current easily enough.
3

Hi Lorne

This is really interesting. Are you interested in getting to the bottom of where the problem lies? In a previous post you suggested I had a misconfiguration but then didn’t reply when I queried where that misconfiguration might lie?

I should stress I’ve been running an updated SangomaOS from your most recent ISO and my experiences are TOTALLY different from yours. In addition, this forum and reddit are strewn with remarks from people saying they couldn’t get EPM to work at all and DPMA only sort of works.

Surely this is useful to you and we should work on finding out why your setup works and mine and others like mine do not?

Thanks for engaging - let’s keep this going!

P.S. HOW would you go about this when the phone locks you out of the web GUI once it’s linked to EPM and I can’t see a why to upgrade to current from within the EPM user interface?

4

Firmware management is a core component of EPM for most devices, and is described in the wiki:
https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FPG/EPM-Admin+User+Guide#EPM-AdminUserGuide-firmwaremanagementFirmwareManagement

5

Fair enough, yes, it’s there under the “installing custom firmware” section. Sorry I didn’t spot that.

So - let me know if you want to progress this bug squashing - am so willing to help.

6

As far as I can tell, you haven’t identified a bug yet. I suspect your difficulties lie in overall lack of familiarity with the product.

7

It’s possible - but look at these comments:

“I’ve had ‘ok’ luck with them and found that it came down to getting the correct templates and such in EPM that kept me from dumping them for Polycom or Yealink (my #1 and #2, respectively).”

"At a former employer we had them paired with SwitchVox and they would just do all kinds of weird shit for no reason and would require us to fully reset the phone (and sometimes the extension). "

“I don’t have a solution, but damn do I hate those Digium phones.”

"Digium phones on *PBX are a pain in the butt, though you should use the Digium plugin to get them to work nicely. "

“Hey, I’ve got a D40, and got mine working with the Digium Phones plugin and not the Endpoint Manager, that might be worth a look. I had custom ringtones and logos pushed to the phone and it was working just fine until a week ago when I updated the plugin and now only the extensions get pushed to the phone but not the customizations. I never did get EPM working at all. I haven’t filed a bug and probably won’t – I’m still on FreePBX 14 and I know that 15 is either out or coming very soon so I’ll probably just wait and see what happens. It’s not a big deal to me as it’s just a homelab PBX, nothing for a company or anything like that.”

" I’ve gotten EPM to work halfway, but certain things get broken (images on phone, blf, intercom) or, if you find a way to hard-code a fix (which I did on some occasions), it breaks another feature. DPMA was the only method that kept my Digiums from freaking out and having issues"

So how can I convince you I’ve found a bug? One EASY way I can think of, but which I hesitate to suggest because it will take time away from you that you don’t have, is for you to download the latest SangomaOS DVD, reset your D50 - and try to set them up together. You will (I think!) encounter some: “issues”!!

Another issue I’ve only just discovered this minute: Call Recording (that you initiate from the Digium D50 during a call using a soft key when configured with DPMA) doesn’t seem to do anything with the recording - I can’t find it in voicemails, which is where I think it’s supposed to go.

8

I work with what’s in front of me. You reported what you believe to be bugs, I report that none of them affect me using the versions noted.

9

I give up. No hard feelings.

10

Hey @dan_ce. I was eating chinese hot pot last night, and somewhere between the pork dumplings and those weird skinny mushrooms, I had a potential insight to your issues. Is it possible that you have either:

  • Not specified or not correctly specified the internal and/or external host names in EPM Global settings or …
  • Not correctly specified the “SIP Destination Address” and/or the “Provisioning Address” in the template you’re using for the Digium phone?
4 Likes
11

@dan_ce
Several months ago I set up a freePBX 14 server with 6 Digium D65 phones. First I played around with EPM, I even bought the full version, but soon realized that EPM is unfinished…it is not reliable and it has many bugs.
I uninstalled EPM and activated the digium phone module in freePBX. Since I needed a special feature, which was not provided in the phone module settings I set up the phones using the advanced DPMA configuration, outlined here
https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/DIGIUM/Advanced+DPMA+Configuration

For months the freePBX-server and the 6 Digium D65 phones work without any issues. I set up the phonebooks in the digium phones module. It just works great!

I published all my setttings and xml-files here in the forum, but it seems one admin deleted most of my postings. He did not like that I suggested to use Digium D65 phones with freePBX instead of the inferior Sangoma phones…but it is the truth…the Digium D65 phones are great phones in combination with freePBX…just stay away from the Endpointmanager :wink:

12

Everyone is free to have (and even express) opinions on hardware; it’s disingenuous to suggest your posts were flagged for something so benign. Disciplinary action was taken for your frequent abuse of forum rules, trolling, and for your continuous attempts at circumventing bans by creating new accounts.

2 Likes
14

Thanks for reaching out, Lorne, I appreciate it. I also appreciate hearing about your dinner. It made me hungry for Korean food (vaguely similar to Chinese I guess?).

I uninstalled DPMA, reinstalled EndPointManager to checked the settings you reference and they’re both correctly populated:

dasdasdas

dsadsadd

15

Have you by chance actually looked at the config file(s) generated for the phone? Does the config file have all the right settings? Because if the config file isn’t being written out properly then that’s going to cause an issue.

Also, have you confirmed that the phone is pulling the config properly? This would be in the Apache logs.

16

Hi Tom

Yes, here I checked that for DPMA.

For DPMA lots of the config works, but not all.

For EPM so far less of the config works. I’ll check the Apache logs for EPM.

I’ve been alternating between the two (DPMA and EPM) trying to get one of them to work. So far it’s a bit piecemeal - bits of one work that don’t work on the other implementation. I took a break from it all over the weekend and am back at it now. :slight_smile:

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