Recently, I started on the journey of setting up a FreePBX system. The reason that I went with FreePBX and not just plain Asterisk is because I honestly didn’t want to have to do everything in text files, I wanted to have a GUI to manage the system with. One of the things that I have been doing is getting phones that are not meant to run on FreePBX/Asterisk actually working on the system. It has been interesting, and at times, made me incredibly frustrated. Some issues that I have run into have been simple, stupid mistakes that in retrospect seem like I should have figured out pretty quickly (such as forgetting to enable the port for the tftp server in the firewall). However, there have been other issues that have made it difficult for me. The thing that has been bugging me the most recently is trying to get a Digium D65 to register to the system, and to be able to configure it from the system. As of writing this, I still haven’t been able to get it working. I am running into issues that I just don’t have the understanding to figure out. However, here is a list of devices that I HAVE gotten to work on the system so far:
- Yealink T46S
- Yealink T21P
- Cisco 8845 on MPP firmware
- Cisco SPA525G
- Cisco PAP2
- Cisco 9971
- Cisco 7965 running SIP firmware
- Cisco DX-650
- Cisco Cius
- Cisco 6921 (kind of, that is a story for another time)
- Mitel 5360
- Mitel 5320
- Polycom VVX 601
- Grandstream HT813 (My interface to my home phone line)
- Nortel 2050 Softphone
And i have been working on expanding that list. The thing that makes this interesting for me is having all these different devices working on the same system, talking to each other, even though they were never meant to be able to do that. A lot of these devices, especially a good chunk of the Cisco devices, were meant to live and die connected to CallManager, and similarly the Mitels were meant to be connected to MiVoice, but I like the idea of having them all working on the same system together. IDK though. Sorry if this is boring, but I just kind of wanted to vent. I have documented a bunch of this on my YouTube channel, at least the things that I have gotten working fully, but there are still things that I would like to try.