Provisioning with Snom Phones

Provisioning FusionPBX with Snom Phones

These instruction are meant for the "CenOS 6.2 with PostgreSQL 9.1" installation script. It may work with other installs as well.

Introduction

FusionPBX provides functionality to generate provisioning files for phones. In this article we will be talking about Snom phones however templates exist for other phones as well.

Provisioning Templates

There are a number of provisioning templates available. We at Helia upload our custom templates at time of install and make any customer changes as required directly using Dreamweaver or Filezilla. Dreamweaver and Filezilla have the ability to manage files over SSH so makes updating the files a bit easier. If you do use these tools and create a new file, make sure you update the owner of the files to apache:apache. By default a new file created when you're root has an owner:group of root:root.

Provisioning templates can be found on the file system at: /var/www/html/fusionpbx/includes/templates/provision

These templates allow for variables to be added for required items like phone account username and password, but also parameters custom to your deployment. The files you find in the provisioning templates folder include examples to follow.

Custom Provisioning Variables

At Helia, we add SNMP and custom phone administration passwords to our deployments. There are variables needed for this that is not included as part of the default install. We add this to our systems using a post install script where other Helia specific items are modified or added. The additional provisioning variables we add are:

- Phone Password - SNMP Trusted Address

To add a "Phone Password" variable in FusionPBX:

1. Log in and go to System > Variables

2. Look for a group called Provision and click the "+" on the right. If there is no Provision group, select the "+" in the top right of the page.

3. On the "Variable Add" page add in the following items:

Name> phone_password

Value> my_secure_password

Category> Provision

If a Provision category doesn't exist then select "Other". Set the custom category field to: Provision

Enabled> true

Description> Admin password on the hardware phone, set via the provisioning file. This will be the password used to access the web interface on a phone (assuming the provisioning template includes it)

4. Click the Save button in the lower right

To add a "SNMP Trusted Address" variable in FusionPBX

5. Find the group called Provision and click the "+" on the right

6. On the "Variables Add" page add in the following items:

Name> snmp_trusted_address

Value> 192.168.0.1/24

Category> Provision

Enabled> true

Description> The trusted address range for SNMP requests. This is in the format required by Snom but may work for other brands as well. Ensure the address matches your internal IP range where SNMP requests will be made from

7. Click the Save button in the lower right

Editing a Provisioning Template

As noted above, provisioning templates can be edited directly from the filesystem using tools like Dreamweaver and Filezilla. They can also be edited directly in the FusionPBX web interface, if you are part of the SuperAdmins group.

To edit a provision template:

1. Select Advanced > Provision Editor from the menu

2. Navigate to Files > Snom > 820 and select {v_mac}.xml from the file tree to the left.

The Snom 820 is a deprecated phone. However at the time of this writing, it is the only Snom template available by default. Helia will endevour to have our Snom template submitted to the source tree and be included with new installs.

At this point I'm assuming you are familiar with XML. Also these instruction are specific to Snom ver 8.x firmware.

3. Ensure there isn't a node named snmp_trusted_address. If there is, just edit the value. If there isn't, add the following xml to the settings > phone-settings branch:

<snmp_trusted_addresses perm="">{snmp_trusted_addresss}</snmp_trusted_addresses>

4. Ensure there isn't a node named http_pass. If there is, just edit the value. If there isn't, add the following xml to the settings > phone-settings branch:

<http_pass perm="RW">{phone_password}</http_pass>

5. Ensure there isn't a node named admin_mode_password. If there is, just edit the value. If there isn't, add the following xml to the settings > phone-settings branch:

<admin_mode_password perm="">{phone_password}</admin_mode_password>

Setting Up a Phone Account for Provisioning

Before you add phone accounts for provisioning, ensure there are appropriate provisioning templates for each of the phone you intend to deploy and that they have been added to the templates/provisioning folder.

1. Select Accounts > Phones from the menu

2. Select the "+" add button in the top right

3. The Mac address must be in the format xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx. We use a barcode scanner and scan the mac in and then manually type the "-" in afterwards. For this example we will be using the MAC address: 00041326B92B. The mac address will need to be entered as: 00-04-13-26-B9-2B

4. The template is the other important piece of info. Select the appropriate template for your phone.

5. Click the Save button in the lower right.

6. From the Accounts menu, select Extensions and select an extension to be provisioned.

7. Scroll down to find a section called "Phone Provisioning". Select 00-04-13-26-B9-2B from the drop down box and select line number as 1. Support for additional lines is defined by the provisioning template. Check the template to see if other lines are supported.

8. Select the "Save" button in the lower right.