Toshiba Phone System

VoIP Networking?

My company is setting up Fonalities VoIP phone system with PBXtra. We are going to create an IP Scope for the phones and hardwire their MAC addresses to these phones. My question is: Is there any way to make this scope provide boot image info using a DHCP config option in case we need to re-provision the phones? We also need to set up a Sub-domain for these IP Addresses and forward DNS to the PBXtra server for this sub-domain. Can anyone point me in the direction to creating a config file/boot image to auto-provision the phones? Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks.

Public Comments

1. This is pretty standard practice with IP Telephony ... I'm a Cisco guy (though not a VoIP expert) but have also had experience with Nortel, Mitel, Avaya and a few others. which DHCP options you set and how that works is ALWAYS vendor specific so you will need to go to documentation for that - I can just tell you that with every vendor I have worked with, this is a common practice. I am not sure what you mean by Sub-domain, but DNS forwarding should be set on your DHCP scope. Hope some of this helps.
2. I haven't worked with Fonalities, but here are my comments on the parts of your question... - You're talking about creating DHCP reserved leases for each VoIP station/phone. Standard practice. - Any boot configuration options for each phone will depend entirely on the capabilities of the phone, but I haven't heard anyone do exactly what you're suggesting (but maybe I just haven't run into someone). The phones I've used have non-volatile RAM which means that even if you unplug the phone, the configuration doesn't disappear. Or, the configuration is stored in the VoIP server and is pushed down when the User logs on to the system. Neither system would require what you're asking about. - Probably not necessary to setup a sub-domain (which is a naming convention) for your phones, but optionally you can configure a special logical subnet (which defines an IP range machines can talk to each other easily). - I'm not sure what you're trying to do with DNS, but depending on the VoIP protocol you're using it's likely that you'll need a special VoIP Proxy (eg SIP Proxy) for stations/phones behind NAT. HTH...