[asterisk-users] Best phone for easy provisioning

[Ed W]

Paul Hales wrote:
> I know Brett and Jurgen have been pretty happy with the Snom's - Brett
> even wrote an auto-provision utility for the Snom's at one time.
>   

Yes, look at the latest Trixbox for the basic SNOM templates and then 
off you go.

You setup a tftp server (easy), the phone looks for two files, one 
generic snom file and another with it's MAC address in the name.  So you 
have generic stuff in one file and specific phone stuff in the other.  
You can get the initial phone config done using DHCP, or just log into 
each phone and change the URL to point to your tftp server.

Get the phone roughly setup manually and then simply look at the web 
config utility, it has an option to dump it's entire config out and so 
you just cut and paste the entries you want to override into the tftp 
files.  Piece of cake.

You can easily reboot all the phones by sending them a certain SIP 
message, and so it's very easy to redeploy a new config, or reboot all 
the phones when you reboot the server.  The phones themselves re-read 
the config every X minutes so they pickup new config quickly even 
without a reboot.

I have a bunch of 360s which I negotiated for about the same price as 
the 320s.  Drop me a line if you want the name of a UK firm to buy them 
from.  They work nicely out of the box including the flashy lights 
showing busy extensions.  The only thing which doesn't work without a 
patch (it appears) is line pickup by pushing the BLF keys.  I can live 
without that, but it would be nice to have.

Happy to post my configs if anyone wants to write up the notes on the wiki?

Ed