{"id":747,"date":"2021-08-10T12:08:31","date_gmt":"2021-08-10T12:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/?p=747"},"modified":"2021-08-11T07:52:13","modified_gmt":"2021-08-11T07:52:13","slug":"provisioning-polycom-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/2021\/08\/10\/provisioning-polycom-phone\/","title":{"rendered":"Provisioning Polycom Phone"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yealink is our go to vendor for telephony hardware, mainly due to its ease and variety of configurability. But recently have been tasked with adding a Polycom VVX250 to the system for a charity to use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the setup between different manufacturers normally follows the same general path. This is a journey of how Polycom interprets it…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Factory Booting<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As these are inerited devices, they were pre-configured to another system and default passwords changed. Luckily (For us anyway) Poly’s implementation still allows a phone to be factory reset even if preconfigured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To factory set a Poly VVX250:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Reboot or power on phone.<\/li>
  2. At the “starting application…” screen, press the cancel button.<\/li>
  3. It will now start a countdown, during this press and hold 1, 3 and 5 on the dialpad, it will now prompt for a password.<\/li>
  4. Enter the device MAC address as the password.<\/li>
  5. Press okay, it should notify that the device is factory reset.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Zero Touch Provisioning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    A feature many manufacturers have is a auto-provision or zero touch provisioning system. As these are going to be the only Poly’s on the system there would be little gain in investing in their service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    To the rescue will be DHCP options, mainly opt. 66 for Boot Server, where we will steer an unprovisioned device to the phone system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Here, add DHCP option 66 to your DHCP server, and add an ASCII value of the address of you phone server, complete with any authentication string.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Configuration<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    While Yealink’s are pretty usable out of the box, Polycom’s require a bit more fettling to get into a working state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    A lot of this fettling is required via the config files it attempts to pull from the provisioning server. Starting with:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Firmware:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Firmware loaded on the phone dictates what files a phone will request from a provisioning server, which I’ve found causes issues when a mismatch of device firmware levels are introduced to a system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Therefore a a matching firmware level server\/client side is required. For this example I used an older 6.1.0.6163 fw that was compatible with our system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Config Files:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Our system, like many modern PBX’s generate a config file on the fly, negating the need to store all config files individually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In this case, while the {MAC}.cfg file can be auto-generated, the site.cfg (system level config) file is not and so has to be manually edited. The connotations of this in a multi-tenant environment means that a lot of customisations are not available, such as wallpapers and even directories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Dial Plan:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    As discovered during testing, a clean Poly device will include a US specific dialplan as default. This causes issues with both UK PSTN calls and local extension calls, sending the call after on 2 digits dialled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Therefore a new dial plan has to be created and added manually to site.cfg. This was my interpretation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    999 emergency
    1xxT emergency, 3 digit NSN

    [1-8]xxxT pbx extensions
    *xxT pbx star codes
    *xxxT pbx star codes

    116xxx 6 digit (excl directory enq)
    08[04]xxxxT 7 digit NSN
    0[18]xxxxxxxT 9 digit NSN
    0[12358]xxxxxxxx 10 digit NSN landline
    07[1-9]xxxxxxx 10 digit NSN mobile (excl personal numbering)

    00x.T International<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
    This translated into the the following strings for the Polycom:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Polycom dialplan string:
    999|1xxT|[1-8]xxxT|xxT|<\/em>xxxT|116xxx|08[04]xxxxT|0[18]xxxxxxxxT|0[12358]xxxxxxxxx|07[1-9]xxxxxxxx|00x.T

    Polycom dial timeout string:
    3|3|3|3|3|3|3<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
    Testing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
    With the above configuration the Poly VVX250 performs as a budget phone normally would.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    A small issue I think customers would fall prey to is the “URL” labelled button that appears when number input is required (calling \/ transferring), when pressed it changed the dial pad into T9 input and would imagine being confusing if the URL press was unintentional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Apart from that, the lack of customisation options in a multi-tenant environment and the cost of the phone compared with its usable feature set would likely rule it out as a product to offer for our platform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    Yealink is our go to vendor for telephony hardware, mainly due to its ease and variety of configurability. But recently have been tasked with adding a Polycom VVX250 to the system for a charity to use. While the setup between different manufacturers normally follows the same general path. This is a journey of how Polycom … Continue reading “Provisioning Polycom Phone”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[327,328,329,326,331,332,330],"class_list":["post-747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-voip","tag-configuration","tag-dhcp-option-66","tag-dial-plan","tag-polycom-vvx250","tag-provision","tag-provisioning","tag-uk-dial-plan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":759,"href":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions\/759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/james-batchelor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}