[asterisk-users] Point a Digium phone to a configuration URL using mDNS without DPMA or DHCP option 66

[A J Stiles]

On Wednesday 27 February 2013, Alex Villací­s Lasso wrote:
> I have the following scenario. A small network has DHCP but does not
> publish option 66. An Asterisk server is on the network, but the Asterisk
> version does not support DPMA and it is hard to switch the version.
> However, there is a possibility to have a web server and an mDNS (Avahi)
> server. I have been reading about provisioning Digium phones without DPMA,
> and it mentions that option 66 can specify the URL prefix to use for the
> XML configuration. Is there a way to specify the same through Avahi mDNS?
> Something along the lines of this (of course this does not work, but gives
> an idea of what I am looking for):

DPMA is proprietary and toxic, so you are quite right not to use it.

If you add a line like
options tftp-server-name "10.0.0.145"
to your DHCP server's /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf , then this will give you the 
"option 66" you need. And note that even although it's advertised as a TFTP 
server, the Digium phones actually put out a HTTP request aot a TFTP request  
(that took some head-scratching to figure out).  So you will need to have 
Apache running on 10.0.0.145; and a bunch of configuration files named like
000fd3000000.cfg
where the digits of the filename are the MAC address of the phone, in the web 
server's default document root  (/var/www/ on Debian systems).

-- 
AJS

Answers come *after* questions.