technobabbler

Those who have embraced asterisk or other VoIP systems have a large choice of phones to deploy on the desks throughout their organization. I’ve personally ordered quite a few phones, and I’ve seen some that are very very bad from a user’s perspective. One particular model was horrible, to the extent of needing to be reset regularly. But one of the models I tested was actually recommended by a user on the asterisk IRC channel… the Polycom IP 501. It’s a multi-line SIP phone with all of the features you would expect to find in a solid desktop phone meant for business. They have a large screen, a very good full-duplex speakerphone, and a built-in switch… so you don’t have to run extra cabling.

One place they do fall short, however, is in the configuration. Many people actually shun Polycom because they refuse to provide reliable support unless you are an actual dealer. The configuration files aren’t well documented, and the firmware is fairly hard to find. That, my friend, is the reason I’m writing this post. I’m going to detail everything you need in order to get a quick deployment model setup in your company. By the end of this, you should be able to add a new phone to your network within about 15 minutes.

By the way, some of those who read this may question why I’m not even glancing in the direction of configuring the phones via the built-in webserver. I’ve taken this route for a few reasons… 1) the built-in webserver is hideously slow, 2) when you change the configuration enough, you have to wait for the phone to reboot (which takes a short eternity) before you can continue configuration, 3) it doesn’t make sense to do all of your configuration manually on every phone, especially if you have more than 2-3 users.

So now that we’ve made our decision, let’s start with the firmware. You can find the latest firmware and bootrom files right here. I suggest you get:

• SoundPointIP_BootROM_2_6_2.zip
• SoundPoint_IP_SIP_1_6_2.zip

Just unzip those files onto your local drive, and try to keep from editing anything in that directory… just so you have clean files to reference.

Now is the time to install an FTP server. Unfortunately, as much as I hate these words, the details are beyond the scope of this article. The main point is that you’ll need a working FTP server that is accessible from your local network. Whether you decide to install it on a local Linux server following my instructions here, or you just install Filezilla Server on a Windows machine, you should be fine. On your FTP server, create a new user by the name of ‘PlcmSpIp’, case IS sensitive. One suggestion, when setting your password you should remember that you’ll be entering the password several times on a telephone keypad, so sticking to a fairly short numeric password might be a good idea. ;)

At this point, revisit the directory of files you unzipped. You’re going to need to copy the following files to your FTP user’s home directory:

• bootrom.ld
• bootrom.ver
• sip.cfg
• sip.ld
• sip.ver
• SoundPointIPWelcome.wav
• The entire SoundPointIPLocalization directory

Also, you’ll need to create a directory called ‘logs’ in the user’s home directory. We’ll configure the phones to upload their log files to this location so that things are fairly tidy.