<span class="gmail_quote">Now I have answer to my own question, i.e. No, they don't. Grandstream Phones unfortunately are not very advanced in remote provisioning system, and they don't have one single file serving the whole installation, instead every phone needs its own configuration file. Then this file has to be converted to its binary format as well using the utility from their website.
<br><br>I recently installed Aastra and I was very happy with their much advanced remote provisioning system. It could also read simple text format files and mass deployment was much easier to control<br><br>But what really impressed me later was Linksys SPA devices. I haven't tried Polycom and Snom yet, but I don't think any other phone can come any way near to the remote provisioning and control system of Linksys. It is highly advanced and very well done system. Becasue it was originally Sipura, which was intended for large scale residential deployments, so they had focused a lot on remote provisioning and device control featurs. Other than its binary format, it can read text, gunzip, xml and some encrypted formats. It has very good system of macros where the administrator doesn't have to type in MAC addresses. It also has very good HTTPS secure provisioning mechanism. And also a way for remote warm and cold reboot using SIP headers. In short words, it is just great and in future I'll prefer Linksys when it'll come to mass deployment. It has already made my life easier dealing with a client with remote extensions. And yes, SPA942 is an excellent phone too.
<br><br><br>On 11/7/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Zeeshan Zakaria</b> <<a href="mailto:zishanov@gmail.com">zishanov@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></span><div id="mb_0"><div>Hi,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Aastra IP Phones have two configuration files on TFTP, aastra.cfg
and <mac>.cfg. Both are in text format, which makes editing easy.
And aastra.cfg has system wide settings and <mac>.cfg has
settings for each indivifual phones. This makes it really easy to
change the global parameters system wide by changing only one
aastra.cfg file.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>On the other hand, as I could understand, for Grandstream TFTP
setup, each phones needs a separate file, which has to be edited and
then converted to its own format usint ./encode.sh. There is no such
file which would carry global settings for all the phones on a system.
Changing 10s of configuration files for one small little thing, like
daylight saving = 0, and then converting all of them to its own format
is not a good way of dealing with many phones.
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Is there a quicker way to change settings for all Grandstream
phones, is there any one file which can act as a global configuration
file without changing each phones phone specific settings? And can't it
be simply done by text editing, without the need to convert each file
to cfg<mac> format?
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>-- <br>Zeeshan A Zakaria </div>
</div><br>