[asterisk-users] OpenVPN/SNOM 820: a review.

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

Hey, all.  Got an SNOM 820 in the other day to kick the tires.  As with
many phones, provisioning it was a bit of a PITA.  The biggest problem, as
far as I could tell, was that their firmware just doesn't seem that
stable, and is sometimes hard to get to.
- I managed to corrupt the firmware twice; fortunately, instead of
bricking the phone, there's a fairly easy-to-use "rescue mode."
- Google was *not* your friend to find the URL to current firmware
  (for non-beta, it's http://wiki.snom.com/Firmware ; for beta, it's
  http://wiki.snom.com/Firmware/V8/Beta )
- There's a (non-standard) VPN release of firmware that has to be
installed to get OpenVPN going.
- Also got WLAN going; note that, apparently (and to my surprise), it
appears that WPA keys are case-sensitive, and the phones default to
uppercase.  Beware.  Also, you have to buy a ~$40 USB stick to get it
going, but that sounds more awkward than it is: the phone has a
nicely-recessed cavity on the bottom where it plugs in.

Next, if you aren't familiar with OpenVPN, I *do not* recommend having the
phone as your first client.  Set up a Linux or Windows client, first, to
get the hang of it.  Then move on to the phone.  For example, one of my
firmware corruptions occurred when I named a file "client.conf" (.conf
being the usual Linux-based OpenVPN configuration file extension), instead
of "client.cnf".  Had to reflash.

Bottom line: the phone actually works quite nicely.  Provisioning for a
one-off is a pain, but SNOM seems to have the hooks in place to make
larger rollouts quite easy.  OpenVPN works like a champ, but should be
handled with care for those who don't have experience with it.  The
speakerphone quality is quite nice, and there are lots of nifty features
the SNOM offers that I haven't seen on other phones -- for example, netcat
is used for debugging OpenVPN, and a SIP log is truly nifty.

One-line summary: recommended, but be prepared to spend some time getting
the first one going if some of the more esoteric features (VPN, WLAN) are
used.

-Ken


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