After recently enduring almost an hour of the trixbox sales pitch for phones that get auto-detected and provisioned when you plug them into your
commercial PBX, Nerd Vittles has embarked upon building the same functionality
for Aastra phones with
PBX in a Flash and, yes, even other Asterisk-compatible LAMP distributions.
So here is a brief summary of how we envision this would work. If there is something we've missed or something you think would be a worthy addition, please chime in... soon!
Prerequisites: With
PBX in a Flash, you're all set. With other distributions, you'll need a recent version of FreePBX, PHP, curl, dhcpd, tftp, and the other usual CentOS utilities.
How It Works: The design assumes you're using
PBX in a Flash behind a router/firewall on a private network. You'll need to turn off the DHCP server on your router/firewall and use the one in
PBX in a Flash because we need its functionality to hand out the location of the tftp server as part of the DHCP lease process. We'll walk you through how to set this up. See also our
original article on setting up the Aastra 57i. It explains how to get tftp working on your system as well.
Once dhcpd and tftpd are running on your server, then there will be a PHP script that gets run each minute or two to check for new DHCP leases. So... someone plugs in an Aastra phone. When the program detects that a new lease has been handed out, it will check to see if the MAC address matches the Aastra phone MAC address profile. Then it will check to see if an existing config file exists for this MAC address. This will tell it whether a new Aastra phone has been plugged into the private network.
When a new phone is detected, the program will create a new extension with voicemail for that phone using some code from Philippe Lindheimer of FreePBX fame. Then it will generate a MAC address-specific Aastra config file assigning this new extension to the phone. Then it will reboot the phone to force a load of the new config file settings.
And, presto, we have a plug-and-play Aastra phone in about a minute.
Linear Mode
