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How to Autoprovision

Posted by raven on Wed, 09/03/2008

I searched the forum topics but I don't see this one, so I thought I'd pose it:
How to autoprovision phones in PBX Manager? How does PBX Manager interact with the autoprovisioning process? I've read that you have to set up the files systems, DHCP & FTP/TFTP servers, etc, either in back-end or externally, and I understand that. But how does PBX Manger link to those file systems and modify the configurations? Finally, is there a step-by-step process that could be developed (either in this thread, or elsewhere), that would be an example to configure BOTH Polycom and Linksys phones?

regards


Submitted by eeman on Wed, 09/03/2008 Permalink

i can only speak for the polycom provisioning, but if you read through your models.txt file it should give you the clues you are looking for.

the models.txt file tells PBX Manager what template files are used to merge the output file and place them in the provisioning directory specified in PBX Manager.

you will _definitely_ want to get more recent polycom firmware and create your own polycom provisioning inside user_provisioning/ . PBX manager will look here first for the phone in models.txt before going to provisioning/. make sure you copy over newer phone1.cfg and sip.cfg from the new firmware as the stock sip.cfg is for sip version 1.65 and causes phones to perpetually reboot that run anything 2.2.0 and upward (this covers just about any of the silver panel models 550,650,560,670,330).

the best provisioning method for polycom is FTP, as the phones do not only download configs but upload logfiles, override files, and contact directories.

Submitted by raven on Tue, 09/16/2008 Permalink

Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen with Capt. Clunk at the controls. Anyway, I will attempt to marry the PBX manager with the polycom config server without hopefully destroying both. This models.txt file, is it on the server w/ PBX Manager? Part of Asterisk?