Hi Bill and thanks for chiming in.
2… I thought that you couldn’t do this with Google voice anymore. Was I given incorrect information?
Thanks in advance.
The Cisco 79x1 phones (and the Cisco 79x0 phones) can be converted to SIP. The x0 phones (7940, 7960) are easier since you just “unlock” the settings where they look for files and then change the IP address to point to your computer. The 79x1 phones are a bit more difficult in that you have to have a DHCP server that supports telling the phone where to get its bits (I think it’s option 66 but may be wrong) The Cisco routers do this, many other ones don’t. Fortunately DD-WRT does support this so I have an old WiFi router around that I use for this purpose. Essentially you tell the DHCP server to point anyone who asks for option 66 to xx.xx.xx.xx IP address.
Then the phone will load the firmware.
Making the x1 phone work on SIP is a bit more difficult as well since Cisco provides no documentation of what the SEPxxxxxx.cnf.xml file should look like. But there are examples on the net that you can find (and if you can’t find them post me a way to get to you and I’ll send you mine)
But FreePBX also supports SCCP/Skinny so you can connect the phones directly up and they should work. probably less work, but I’ve never done it so can’t provide guidance there.
Also you should know that as of FreePBX 14 when they swapped in chan_pjsip for chan_SIP that the phones won’t register. There is a workaround by editing one of the configuration files (I forget which) but every time you change anything FreePBX overwrites your changes. There is a mechanism to have a post-load configuration file included but that doesn’t seem to work. I swapped back to chan_sip on port 5160 instead of trying to figure it out.
As for Google Voice, GV was shutting down mechanisms that let you talk to them a while back, but the Motif configuration has overcome those issues. I use my Google Voice with the Motif connection daily and it works fine. On FreePBX 14, there is an issue with Motif 13.0.2 when configuring new GV channels in that it does not create the outbound routes and trunks that you need. This is fixed in 13.0.4 but you have to do some special work to get that until it is officially released. See here:
https://issues.freepbx.org/browse/FREEPBX-16520?jql=project%20%3D%20FREEPBX%20AND%20text%20~%20"GV"
(although it shows published right now so you can probably get it without including edge support)
On Skinny/SCCP: There was a recent CVE entry on the “native” Skinny module, so I would avoid that unless you want to take the steps recommended in the response.
I’ve done this and written a Wiki page on the Chan-SCCP-B site that describes not only how to set up the SCCP channel driver, but covers the configuration file “challenges”. At one point (back in Asterisk 1.8), I had a SCCP Phone Manager (like ECP) but the database interface and code base changed so much that the program became OBE.
The SIP loads for the 79xx phones has some serious security issues, including a terrible password length. This issue alone was the reason I started down the Chan-SCCP-B rabbit hole.
didn’t know that about SIP security issues, although I’m running this PBX in my house and me and my wife are the only ones that use them so I’m not too worried