[asterisk-users] Polycom 501 sluggish keys: found the problem!

[Stephen Bosch]

Kenneth Padgett wrote:
>> I have learned the hard way that using old configs with new firmware is
>> asking for trouble. It is much better to keep your custom configurations
>> in a MAC specific overrides file and replace the sip.cfg and phone1.cfg
>> files completely.
>>
>> This doesn't guarantee that you won't have problems, but it's a lot
>> easier to troubleshoot an overrides file with a dozen items in it than
>> to sift through big, customized sip.cfg files.
> 
> Where can I find documentation on how to setup an override file using
> the phone's MAC? I see a (MAC)-phone.cfg file the phone uploads has
> something about overrides in it, but it looks like settings that the
> phone re-reads...
> 
> Any help appreciated! Thanks.

There is a Polycom white paper, part number 3725-17461-001/A, that is
available from the Polycom website. The white paper title is
"Configuration File Management on SoundPoint IP Phones". It outlines how
configuration files are specified and loaded by the phone.

The document is useful as a starting point, with these caveats:

It specifically warns *against* using the {MACADDR}-phone.cfg file for
configuring custom settings on the phone, because "this is the name of
the configuration override file generated by the phone when the user
changes a setting such as the preferred ring type."

The instructions recommend creating a totally custom file specific to
the phone and then calling the file in the {MACADDR}.cfg file. This
didn't work for us, whether we used a name like "local-settings.cfg" or
"custom1.cfg" or a name like {MACADDR}-custom.cfg. The only thing that
did work was putting the configuration changes in the
{MACADDR}-phone.cfg and making the file {MACADDR}-phone.cfg read-only.
(This is on the SIP 2.1.0 firmware.)

It's possible that we were specifying the files incorrectly in the
{MACADDR}.cfg file; they are read from left to right, and that's how
they were entered. Nevertheless, the only thing that has worked is to
put the custom configurations in an overrides file.

Some people may need users to be able to configure overrides, but that's
not the case for us.

-Stephen-