SARK V4.0.1 Provisioning

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Overview

SARK has an extensive and extensible provisioning system capable of automatically most popular phones types. From release 4.0.1 the provisioning system is HTTP only (no TFTP or FTP) and capable of provisioning both local and remote phones. The system synthesises each provisioning stream at the point it is requested by the phone. In the 4.0.1 release the following phone types are supported

  • Aastra - all models
  • CiscoSPA - all phone models (not ATA's)
  • Polycom - all models
  • Snom - all models
  • Yealink - all models

All of the above can be given the provisioning server address via DHCP (usually option 66) The following phones can be given their provisioning server address using SIP multicast (PnP)

  • Snom - all models
  • Yealink - all models


Automatically adding extensions with ZTP/PnP

SARK can automatically create extensions and provisioning data on-the-fly for phones which support SIP multicast provisioning. This has major benefits for users of these SIP/PnP aware phones :-

  • There is no need to run DHCP option 66, and no need to run an on-board DHCP server.
  • The provisioning stream is synthesized by the listener on-demand
  • No need to enable tftp or ftp on the server.
  • New phones can optionally be provisioned and defined to asterisk on-the-fly by the listener/builder.

PnP and ZTP

In globals panel there are 2 switches called "PnP Provisioning" and "Zero Touch Provisioning". They each do slightly different things.

  • "PnP Provisioning" (or SIP Plug 'n Play) turns on the SIP Multicast listener. This allows SARK to asynchronously tell a SIP phone where its provisioning file is located without the need to modify the existing DHCP server or to run an on-board DHCP server or even to run the SARK unit at a static IP address. The SARK listener will respond to SIP broadcast packets from SIP devices requesting provisioning information. If SARK already has a definition in its database for the device making the request then it will respond with a URL reference from which the device may retrieve its provisioning data. This is very similar in principle to Option 66 being served by a DHCP server except that no setup is required.
  • "Zero Touch Provisioning" (ZTP) is a feature which you will normally only turn on for short periods of time, for example during initial system installation or perhaps when new phones are being added to an existing system. It works in conjunction with PnP, so PnP must be enabled for it to work. Whereas PnP will only provision phones it already knows about, ZTP will create new entries in the database and automatically provision phones it hasn't seen before. When ZTP is running, you can connect a new phone to the network and ZTP will automatically create a new extension for it in the SARK database and dynamically generate provisioning information for it. In other words, the phone can provision itself and be ready to use with no human intervention. This is a hugely productive feature when you have a lot of phones to roll out and configure in a short period of time. For security reasons, you should only run ZTP during initial system installation or when you have new phones to roll-out. The remainder of the time it should be switched off.

PnP and Multiple SARK instances in the same sub-net

In order to be able to run multiple PBX servers in the same subnet, the Multicast listener must be able to selectively reply to only those PnP aware phones which it "owns" (i.e. are defined to it). For this reason, unless ZTP is enabled, SARK will only respond to requests from phones for which it already has an entry in its database. It recognizes individual phones by their MAC addresses. This mode of operation is much the same as regular DHCP 66 type provisioning; i.e. only phones which have been predefined to the system will be provisioned. In this way, multiple servers may all be listening for Multi-casts and each can respond to its own group of phones without disrupting other listeners.

Provisioning with DHCP

You can provision almost any phone by using DHCP to tell the phone where the SARK provisioning server is located. You can optionally use the on-board SARK DHCP server to provide DHCP to your phones or any DHCP service which supports the setting of DHCP options. Most phones request Option 66 but some require a different option to be set (see your manufacturer's documentaion).

The 5 main supported manufacturers require the following server URLs to get their provisioning data from SARK

Manufacturer url
Aastra 
http://your.sark.ip.address/provisioning
CiscoSPA http://your.sark.ip.address/provisioning/$MAU
Polycom http://your.sark.ip.address/provisioning
Snom http://your.sark.ip.address/provisioning?mac={mac}
Yealink http://your.sark.ip.address/provisioning
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