In hosted PBX environments, it is very useful to provision phones without too much user involvement. Unfortunately, there is usually no DHCP option 66 available or other means, such as multicast discovery. What many phone vendors have added over time is a redirection service that tells each phone from where to get its configuration data.
What happens is the phone, with its MAC address, contacts a website at the manufacturer and asks for a provisioning server address. If it has been set up, it then fetches the data from that address. The server can check by the client certificate of the phone if the request is really from the phone or just someone trying to steal that information.
Vodia has had this feature for snom phones for a while now, and we are pleased to see Yealink has a similar service available for its phones. Because the API looks almost the same, it was easy for us to integrate this provisioning mechanism into the Vodia PBX. This feature will be available in the next version.
Those who don't want to use the feature should contact Yealink to get a username and a password for accessing the provisioning server.
As usual, we aren't about providing builds for testing this feature out. The latest, 5.3.0a, already includes the new feature.
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