Having not long joined the company, telephones in the office were a little bit of a nightmare. We were running an unstable PBX that insisted on a reboot several times a day. Calls were being dropped. The staff had lost faith in the company telephone system and something needed to be done.
We decided to do away with the proprietary rubbish we were using and implemented a new Asterisk PBX solution.
Despite not having the time, I left my colleague to it and spent half the day researching provisioning of the Linksys SPA942 VoIP phone which we had an abundance of around the office. I can remember pondering how the company had deployed the configuration in the past. All the evidence points to a history of manual configuration – and there was no way I was doing that. Our deadline was getting closer and there were a lot of phones to migrate over to the new system.
That was a busy week. I ended up implementing a template based provisioning profile that was manually triggered from the web interface of the phone. Not perfect by it worked. Using the MAC address, it downloaded the configuration file from the web server and like magic, the phones came online one by one.
I knew provisioning was the way to go and there were so many possibilities including DHCP provisioning which I thought would be awesome. Just no time…
I read a fantastic article today which I wish I had found when the above was going on. I wanted to make a post dedicated to get some traffic over to it because it is well deserved. If you’re looking to provision the Linksys SPA942 or SPA962 phone, make sure you drop by the comprehensive and detailed blog post Bulk Linksys SPA9*2 Provisioning by AndyB.
Without a doubt I’ll be requesting some time to revisit the provisioning template solution around the office.
