GO HERE Remote Phones with Incredible PBX

[empireweb]

Hello All,

I have been reading a lot from the different forums and learning quite a bit. Although, I have been searching and learning from the archives I still have question.

I was looking for a better solutions for my small business and stumbled onto the article about using Incredible PBX for CuBox-i; I got myself one, followed the instructions and I had a working phones right away.
My question is I want to give out IP phones to my employees to take home, how do I configure the phones to connect to the PBX from the office. We are using Polycom VVX 300 phones

 

[jroper]

Hi

It's not ideal that you open ports 5060 UDP and 10,000:20,000 UDP to the internet, which would once have been the recommendation. Some people have to do it, but best avoided if possible.

This leaves you some options, and I am assuming that you have a fixed public IP address at the office, or it gets more complex.

1. If your employees can be put onto fixed public IP addresses, then you can whitelist these addresses in your router, and allow connection to the VoIP ports. If they are not static, then you really should not consider this.

2. You could set up PPTP VPN on your PBX, and then purchase a simple (and cheap) cable router that supports PPTP VPN (most do) for each employee, configured to connect back to the PBX and plug the phone into one of its ethernet ports. This also has the advantage that your remote workers can securely connect to other resources in your office. You may want to find out which ISP's your employees are using, discover their IP ranges, and whitelist only these ranges to allow VPN access.

A little more fiddly because you want to use physical phones rather than soft-phones on a PC, but doable, is to consider port knocker, Neorouter and Travelling Man, all searchable on this forum.

Joe

 

[wardmundy]

Some other alternatives are documented in the Nerd Vittles tutorial on the Incredible PBX Security Model for Asterisk.

 

[BeerCan]

I don't know if you are locked into the polycom phones so what I say might be irrelevant. I have a bunch of remote users and found that the yealink phone are the easiest to set up with an openvpn solution. Once I started setting remote users that way my support calls went down dramatically.

 

[islandtech]

Second that Yealink and their openvpn solution

 

[empireweb]

Thank you for all the suggestions. I like the idea of using openvpn and will invest on Yealink phones. I am not locked into into a polycom deal, I will simply get new ones. would it be an issue if I install openvpn on the same box as the PIAF? right now I have it install in the CuBox-i

 

[islandtech]

I prefer openvpn on the router

 

[safa0786]

Snom 760 series Got OpenVPN Build in

 

[BeerCan]

I prefer openvpn on the router

I also like openvpn on the router or as a separate VM.