I want to second this one. Great idea.

I would suggest taking even one step further and separate the templates in /etc/asterisk/provisioning to be tenant specific also. Many times tenants request something unique to be defined for their polycom that perhaps another tenant wants defined differently. A really easy example for illustration could be the digitmap or alertInfo ring tones or even different logos on their polycom displays.

technically you could get away with a single FTP repository as long as the local-settings.cfg file were perhaps renamed to local-${tenant}.cfg so that each tenant had their own unique settings.

I ran into a situation yesterday that made me think of this new feature suggestion again. I had changed an aastra.cfg file to add something for a customer, and I accidentally overwrote the file while provisioning another customer's phones last night. If the files were written to a tenant specific directory that would not happen as easily.

When I find a free moment :) I'll think about this and what else in provisioning may have to be (optionally) configurable on the tenant level.

Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks,
Alex

I disagree, this will make management and support a total nightmare..

if there is a problem thats affecting other users in the config it would seem this is a problem that needs to be looked at instead..

G

I already implemented a few things along these lines:

1) User provisioning directory - user can define new models, override existing models with their own templates, and this does not get overwritten during upgrades etc (this is not per tenant).
2) ${TENANT} variable that gets substituted so that different provisioning files can be generated for different tenants - e.g. one could define a model called Polycom tenant 1 and Polycom Tenant 2 and pull in different templates and generate different files.
3) User defined variables that get substituted with specified values
4) Command to execute after a device is provisioned

All this will be available in the upcoming release.

Anything I missed?

Alex

Alex, I'm trying to come up with a way to keep the Polycom directory files seperate for each tenant. Adding the ${TENANT} variable is exactly what I need. Is it available in 5.1.2? Any major concerns with upgrading from 5.0.51 to 5.1.2?

I am about to release 6.0 which has support for ${TENANT} and also allows to create tenant directories under /user_provisioning/ as /user/provisioning/tenant1, user_provisioning/tenant2 and place tenant specific templates there.

6.0 is almost ready - please watch the announcements.

Best regards,
Alex

Anyone got this to work?

I booted up the ISO and added the directory /tftpboot/thirdlane

I always get "Error saving settings : Configuration files directory does not exist" I tried to change the setting to /tftpboot/${TENANT} but I get the error.

-Matt

The way it is supposed to work is that it uses templates from /user_provisioning/tenant directories but still puts all the output files in the same directory for all the tenants.

Do you actually need separate provisioning directories for each tenant? I guess that may be useful, but I don't think it is currently implemented.

Best regards,
Alex

Alex,

Yes, we would like different provisioning directories for each tenant.

Something like /home/phone/${TENANT} would put the files in
/home/phone/cust1
/home/phone/cust2
etc.

We use the FTP program to direct the ftp user to the correct directory on the file system.

Thanks!

-Matt

Matt, I'm doing something sort of like that, but not exactly. I, too, wish there was a clean way to write files to seperate directories. I added a tenant specific settings file to my {mac}.cfg files for polycoms. This is the template for my {mac}.cfg.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>

I never touch sip.cfg, and local-settings.cfg is for global configs that are set for all of my customers. Tenant-settings.cfg is per tenant.

I also create a tenant specific contact_directory for directory.xml files.

The big problem with the way I'm doing this is that I have to manually create the tenant-settings.cfg file and the contacts directory. I originally set it up so that MTE's provisioning created the tenant-settings files, but, the template would have to be different for each tenant to make this file do what I want.

There's a little pain in running it this way, but it helps meet my needs.

Dan

I do something similar with my polycom phones in MTE except I do it with models.txt

[polycom-550]
label=Polycom 550
lines=4
phone_template=polycom_phone.cfg
line_template=polycom_line.cfg
output=${mac}-registration.cfg
input_1=polycom_mac.cfg
output_1=${mac}.cfg
input_2=polycom_local.cfg
output_2=${TENANT}-settings.cfg
required_1=sip.cfg
required_2=phone1.cfg

then my polycom_mac.cfg looks like this (for SIP 3.0.2 firmware)
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<!-- SIP Application Configuration File -->
<!-- $Revision: 1.100.4.15 $ $Date: 2006/01/23 19:36:38 $ -->
<APPLICATION APP_FILE_PATH="sip.ld"
CONFIG_FILES="${mac}-registration.cfg,${TENANT}-settings.cfg,phone1.cfg,sip.cfg"
MISC_FILES=""
LOG_FILE_DIRECTORY="/LOGS/"
OVERRIDES_DIRECTORY="/OVERRIDES/"
CONTACTS_DIRECTORY="/CONTACTS/"
LICENSE_DIRECTORY="/LICENSE/"/>
<APPLICATION_SPIP300 APP_FILE_PATH_SPIP300="sip_212.ld" CONFIG_FILES_SPIP300="${mac}-registration.cfg, ${TENANT}-settings.cfg, phone1_212.cfg, sip_212.cfg"/>
<APPLICATION_SPIP500 APP_FILE_PATH_SPIP500="sip_212.ld" CONFIG_FILES_SPIP500="${mac}-registration.cfg, ${TENANT}-settings.cfg, phone1_212.cfg, sip_212.cfg"/>
</APPLICATION>

i can then use a vanilla configuration in /etc/user_provisoining/ that will work for most tenants. IF, and only if, I have to define something different for a tenant will I create that file in /etc/user_provisioning/tenant. In such cases I might only need to create /etc/user_provisioning/polycom_local.cfg and let everything else run the /etc/user_provisioning versions.

Erik Smith
CTO
BluegrassNet Voice
dCAP