Snomtastic Phone Management System (Part 3)

In this part we will configure the application for our environment. I already created AD user account “snomtastic” which will serve as service account for Snomtastic in order to read our Active Directory.

Configure as follow:

…and Save Settings

Let’s now check if our config works. Click on “User” on left and then “Add User”

Cool!. We read AD and now I can add users to the application.

…and add one or more users the same way.

***This version of Snomtastic does not utilize the Password field and so, I did not use it.

Next step is to configure the actual OCS environmental variables. Click “Configurations” on left and then “Default”.

***We could have many configurations and assign phones to either. Just one example : you might have two environments – one on US and one in Europe. By assigning the units to the appropriate configuration, the phone clock could show US time on the display of the units in US and military time on the European phones. You get the picture…

The Default profile is pre-configured already. All you have to do is to replace few variables – your domain, service account and… the phone admin account. Pay attention on the later. This is how you will access the phone interface once the phone is managed by the application.

In this configuration example, the Phone Admin username is “padmin” and the password is “l3tm31n”

Now that we have this part completed, I must connect one Snom300 to my network and see what happens next.

There is something I need to do beforehand. If you refer to this post: http://www.lynclog.com/2010/08/managing-snom-endpoints-in-your.html, I must tell the phones where is the management application via DHCP. In this case, since I don’t use DHCP Option 66 for anything else, I will take a shortcut and just pop it in my DHCP server. However, it is highly advisable to use the “other” way described in the post above.

On my DHCP server I will provision Option 66 pointing to my newly created Snomtastic server.

***The string MUST be in this format: http://Snomtastic _FQDN/register.aspx?mac={mac}

What will happen now is – I will connect Snom300 to the network, the phone will receive Provisioning URL via Option 66, send registration request to Snomtastic server, the application will reply and send back unique username and password to be used later for Custom Basic Authentication.

Currently I don’t have phone registered in my application.

…but now this unit appears in my application. Next, I will assign configuration profile and user to it.

…and save the changes. As you can see, the user lu2@drago.local is now assigned to this unit. One user can be assigned to many phones, of course…

You would think this is all, but now. As any environment, there a number of configuration tasks that must be performed and once done, we can relax and enjoy the ease of management.

In the next post we will install the client application (that is – the little client that resides on user’s computer and monitors the password changes) and configure firmware updates.

Snomtastic Phone Management System (Part 4)