[asterisk-users] Using MAC or extension number as SIP identifier

[Daniel Hazelbaker]

On Nov 20, 2008, at 9:02 AM, Olivier wrote:

> 2008/11/20 Daniel Hazelbaker <daniel at highdesertchurch.com>
> Any reason you want to use the MAC address?  If it is just for easy
> provisioning, I just put a MAC address field in the realtime SIP table
> and use a php script to take the phone's MAC address and feed it the
> login information it needs.
>
> provisioning is the first reason.
> I also thought it could help to separate devices, users and other  
> resources.

What I currently do to separate "devices" (fax machines, modems, etc.)  
is give them actual names.  I.e. I have "northFax" and "southFax"  
defined (so I would type 'sip show peer northFax').  In my mind, and  
particularly in my use, anything that a person dial's as an extension  
is going to have a person on the other end.  Other things can have  
names because end users won't be dialing them as extensions.  The fax  
machines are "tied" to a dedicated phone number so Asterisk dial's it  
internally.

> as you obviously cannot tie MAC address to a dialing string, this  
> forces you to query a database somewhere for every call ...
>
> I'm not fully convinced of this, anyway, but when I thought about  
> it, I felt frightened about loosing things I'm used to ...

Correct.  We setup a macro that uses a MySQL database to handle our  
extension dialing, we don't dial by MAC address but if you were so  
inclined, I suppose you could. As far as speed goes, we query the  
database about 4-6 times for every call.  85 users, 9 telco lines,  
Dell 2950 server, and we peak at about 0.2% cpu usage.  Again for  
simplicity, having all the "front-scene" stuff match what the end-user  
is talking about is very nice.  There is no reason you couldn't do  
some naming convention like 'user<Extension#>', 'device<Extension#>',  
'other<Extension#>'.  That might help in your separation and wouldn't  
be too hard to figure out.

Daniel

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