How can I setup the Hitachi IP5000 for use with my new new FreePBX

General Help
1

I set FreePBX on a server I have running at home. It all went pretty much without a hitch (using two inbound lines…one for calls one for fax … both using Google Voice.)

Someone at work gave me a Hitachi IP5000 phone that was going to be trashed. It mostly works…a little quirky though.

I am able to connect to the phones built in web server but I am completely clueless on how to get the phone to work with FreePBX. I am little surprised on how little information I have found on this topic (setting up SIP phones) on the website. I think maybe I just haven’t found the page yet.

I am technical (a software developer) but I have to admit that wien it comes to VOIP PBX I am a complete newbie.

I setup an extension that I would like the IP5000 to use, assigned it a secret, but that is all I have been able to do. I cannot get the phone to work on the system.

The phone has a register option. When I try to use it if Fails. The phone IS setup on my wireless network…the same network that the pbx is on.

So if someone could give me step by step instructions on setting up the SIP phone on FreePBX (or clarifying documentation) that would be greatly appreciated.

Regard,
Seth

2

You will not find generic phone documentation because there is simply nothing different than any other SIP device.

The Hitachi is not a popular model a couple of references on some of the mailing list to folks using it so we know at least anecdotally that it works with Asterisk.

For any SIP device to work it only needs to be supplied the username (extension number) SIP password (secret) and the IP of the SIP server (your FreePBX box).

Don’t even think about trying to get SIP to work behind NAT until you get the phone working on the same network.

So basically you need to understand how SIP works or you are not going to have much success.

3

Turns out that the name in the phone setup had to be the extension number. Once I set that up all was well. But the phone really does suck.

4

Seth- See that’s the kind of thing that is so hard to help with in a forum.

The basis for SIP, target IP, user, password and CODEC in the SDP are about all that are needed to make a SIP connection. Anything else to me is in the tuning category.

Every device has a different nomenclature but it’s the same thing. User, name, device-ID, auth ID, extension et al. Then password, secret, security word etc.

FreePBX happens to only support numeric SIP device names so many examples will be user names.

To me it’s intuitively obvious when you look at the output of ‘sip show peers’ in Asterisk that FreePBX created a peer with the extension name as the peer name.

While the system is free the knowledge to setup an IP voice is corporate level communications and IT.

The building blocks to me look like this:

Foundations:

Operating Systems and File Systems with *nix experience (Linux is a breeze for someone that learned on System V, BSD or Xenix).

Networking, clear understanding of ISO model with emphasis on Layer 2 and 3. VLAN’s, routing, switching and QoS. Ability to troubleshoot from an ISO perspective in a structured and logical way.

Digital Communications: Understand digital coding and transport. TDM, PCM and Linear and Non-Linear transcoding. Overview of popular voice and video CODEC’s.

Telco: Familiarity with digital transport (T1’s) and packet switched systems. Analog signalling and basic telephony helps too.

Internet: TCP/IP and the whole suite of Internet protocols such as DNS, DHCP, TFTP, FTP, SSH, SCP the whole alphabet soup

SIP and RDP and RTCP

Now with all that you have a framework to understand Asterisk. Once you know what Asterisk does then, and only then, can you utilize FreePBX in it’s full capacity.

Most of us are very tolerant of the hobbyist, home user and small businessman hacking away at all of this. Personally I am slightly less tolerant of the SMB’s that save thousands of dollars over a closed source system and expect free help in the forums with any amount of accuracy or accountability. This is what I do for a living and if you want me to be accountable to you I think I should be paid. Lastly I have no tolerance at all for the individuals that sell FreePBX based systems on unsuspecting victims without the knowledge of how to maintain them. If a poster mentions clients or customers and is clueless, my desire to help is just about 0.

This seemed like a good opportunity to post about this because it comes up in the forums all the time. I am very happy you got your phone to work and I hope that you are having fun with it. Don’t be afraid to poke around under the hood. The lifestyle applications of Asterisk/FreePBX are endless.