Phone provisioning without FreePBX Distro

What’s the provisioning procedure for these phones on a plain PBX? I can’t find any details on configuration syntax, or much info on what is accepted for an option 66 string. What protocols are supported for configuration and firmware transfers?

Also, documentation makes mention of a couple of modules I don’t see in the module admin page: Phone Apps 13.0.9, End Point Manager 13.0.39. How can I install them?

The phones are only designed for FreePBX Distro as the End Point Manager and Phone Apps require a Distro that is supported by FreePBX and that is only the FreePBX Distro

That’s a disappointment; I’m sure it won’t cause any problems if you’re marketing to home users or small businesses running their own PBX. However I suspect it will be a non-starter for many larger enterprises and ITSPs.

I think you’re over-thinking this. DHCP Option 66 just tells the phone where to look for its configuration. Have you tried putting a URL in there, and seeing what happens? (It works, honestly 8-))

If you want to NOT use endpoint manager, there’s nothing stopping you from downloading the config.xml file from the phone and editing it to suit. It’s reasonably well documented internally.

However, that’s an enterprise-y thing, and I would expect that anyone who wanted to do that would already be confident and competent in their ability to generate config files on demand. Of course, feel free to ask here if you have any questions, but, you’ll find that when you actually look at the contents of the XML file, it’s pretty self explanatory.

Thanks, I haven’t got my hands on a phone yet, and putting a URL in doesn’t help if you don’t know what files it’s asking for, what goes in those files, or even what sort of URL it takes. In any case, your fearless leader is the one saying it won’t work, not me!

We currently use Polycom phones for the most part, with an in-house module for config generation. We’d like an alternative that integrates better with the PBX (e.g. DND or CF button on the phone enables the feature on the PBX, and vice-versa.)

We thought this sounded like the solution (and would be happy to use EPM if it were available) but we’ve got a virtual infrastructure that I don’t care to drop many copies of an unknown distro into.

Miken32

All the features on the phone all rely on our End Point Manager and Phone apps to work so buying our phones for a system without those loose all the features of the Phone. I wasn’t trying to be dismissive but without those 2 modules you have just a regular SIP Phone.

If you have a phone you can easily go into the GUI and export the config of the phone and every config option is exported with a comment on what each one is. Its very well documented as part of the export process.

As far as what file it looks for just point one at a TFTP server and you will see the sequence of files it looks for. It starts with a model config and if their applies it. Then it looks for a mac.xml config and if their applies that over the top.

Don’t think that people won’t be happy with a regular SIP phone! That’s what we’ve got with Polycom right now, and we’re 90% happy with those.

We’ve got a couple on the way so I’ll see what I can make them do…

It’s not like it’s ‘unknown’ - it just takes one management issue off your hands. For example, there was a security release of Asterisk 13.8 yesterday, and machines running FreePBX Distro are already updated with the fix (or, will be, if they haven’t enabled automatic updates, when they type ‘yum update’).