FreePBX - Provisioning Server setup for Polycom phones

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drmoorenz

11 posts

Geek

#171780 30-Apr-2015 22:54

Hi, I have setup FreePBX from the latest distro - I was able to get a SIP Trunk running and configure a Polycom 330 phone manually on the handset. Calling inbound and outbound working fine :)

However, I have purchased 3x Polycom 321 handsets and wanted to setup a Provisioning Server that autoconfigures these phones for me.

I have installed an Open Source End Point Manager (OSS Endpoint Manager) but I can not seem to make it work - I have read numerous forums and documentation but I may be noob'ing out on something. Has anyone had any joy with this setup? Could you suggest anything that might point me in the best direction?

Cheers

chevrolux

4962 posts

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#1294676 30-Apr-2015 23:53

I guess the first question I will ask is do they have a template for that phone in the OSS EPM? It isn't really maintained any more as they have the commercial EPM which has just about any sip device you can think of.

Next is, how does Polycom do provisioning? Over http or tftp? You need to set it up to do one or the other.
A simple way to test if the config file is there over http is simply putting the url in to your browser (may have to manually put in the mac to do this though) and see if it downloads a file (or just displays the contents on the page)

sbiddle

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Biddle Corp

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#1294746 1-May-2015 08:31

I'll be brutally honest here - you should either dedicate the next few weeks of your life learning how Polycom provisioning works, or you should buy new phones. If you don't want to do either, buying the Commercial Endpoint manager will make life a lot easier for you.

Polycom make brilliant hardware, and I have plenty of these deployed (a lot using the OSS Endpoint manager - which is still being maintained, but not officially). Their logic and provisioning is pretty complex and quite frankly there is no easy way to explain it. In a nutshell you need to load the firmware and base files for the phone onto the PBX as well as the config files which will be generated by the PBX. You then need to chose a provisioning type (HTTP/HTTPS/TFTP) and send the correct URL to the phone, the easiest way of which is via DHCP Option 66.

drmoorenz

11 posts

Geek

#1295442 2-May-2015 01:18

sbiddle: I'll be brutally honest here - you should either dedicate the next few weeks of your life learning how Polycom provisioning works, or you should buy new phones. If you don't want to do either, buying the Commercial Endpoint manager will make life a lot easier for you.

Polycom make brilliant hardware, and I have plenty of these deployed (a lot using the OSS Endpoint manager - which is still being maintained, but not officially). Their logic and provisioning is pretty complex and quite frankly there is no easy way to explain it. In a nutshell you need to load the firmware and base files for the phone onto the PBX as well as the config files which will be generated by the PBX. You then need to chose a provisioning type (HTTP/HTTPS/TFTP) and send the correct URL to the phone, the easiest way of which is via DHCP Option 66.

To be honest, your "nutshell" description makes more sense to me then any documentation I was able to find. Thanks you made it very clear my pathway moving forward :)

Zeon

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#1295805 2-May-2015 17:14

We use Yealink phones and while the quality of the hardware isn't too great, the provisioning is somewhat easy using the OSS. I did edit the files myself though as the new Yealink firmware has a new config file style that OSS hasn't been updated with yet.

BTW are people still doing PBX in a flash/Trixbox or just FreePBX directly?

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chevrolux

4962 posts

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#1295843 2-May-2015 18:57

Zeon: We use Yealink phones and while the quality of the hardware isn't too great, the provisioning is somewhat easy using the OSS. I did edit the files myself though as the new Yealink firmware has a new config file style that OSS hasn't been updated with yet.

BTW are people still doing PBX in a flash/Trixbox or just FreePBX directly?

FreePBX have made it so so incredibly simple to get a server running I don't know why anyone would bother with the others.

I see the biggest benefit of using the official distro is getting use of the commercial modules. $75 for the commercial EPM is money well spent IMO if the server is being implemented in a business enviroment. REST apps are pretty cool too (not on yealink though).

drmoorenz

11 posts

Geek

#1310214 22-May-2015 23:17

Got the provisioning all working perfectly. Although I had to download the firmware and do a bit of tinkering. But works a treat!