Automating Provisioning of SPA2102 and SPA8000 units

[chris.stokes]

All,

We're attempting to configure Cisco SPA IP Phones and Cisco SPA ATA devices via .xml files stored on a web server.  If we manually configure the devices using the Profile_Rule setting in the web configuration this process works fine.  We want to automate the process by passing the address of the web server to the phone in a DHCP option.

For the IP phones we can successfully perform this operation by putting the web server's URL in Option 160 which is then passed along with the IP address to the phones (testing with SPA525G and SPA508G).

This does not work for the SPA8000.  Is this by design?

When the SPA8000 boots up and sends out a DHCP discover message it does not request Option 160.  It does request 66, but TFTP isn't useful in this scenario.  The documentation implies that you can pass a http:// address in option 66 but that is invalid and does not work.

Can any one provide any insight on performing HTTP provisioning on these ATAs?

[alissitz]

Hello Chris, I hope you are well. 

Today the ATAs support DHCP option 66 that points to a TFTP location.  This works well in terms of scale ... here is an example of how to scale this:

In a typical provisioning scenario to use HTTP for our ATAs (which do not support DHCP Option 160):

On the DHCP Server, set Option 66 to the IP address of the TFTP server. On the TFTP server, have a generic file named spa8000.cfg, which contains the full profile rule.

SPA8000 boots, grabs Option 66, gets spa8000.cfg which configures the SPA8000 with the full URL of the profile rule (http:///cfg/spa$MA.cfg)

Does this make sense?  This is similar to how the phones could be done, although with the phones we have greater and additional functionality in the methods to fetch the initial or complete config.  Some people prefer the initial configs ...

Your thoughts?  

Andrew Lee Lissitz

[alissitz]

One more thought ... in a mixed environment, you can also specify spa$PSN.cfg  in the DHCP option 66.

This would then work on the phones or ATAs ... your thoughts?

[chris.stokes]

Andrew,

That's precisely our setup, only substitute TFTP for HTTP and 66 for 160.  We standardized on HTTP because not all products support provisioning via TFTP, and (up until now) all the products support HTTP.  Well to be fair, these devices do support provisioning over HTTP, just not automated the way we want (which is the way you outlined).  Also you can't use a path in TFTP, so we'd only be able to use a single spa8000.cfg file in a single folder, which we'd have to edit every time a different customer wanted these services.

Anyway, my confusion stems from some of the combined documentation that infer that the provisioning for ATAs is the same as for the IP phones, but I'm seeing now that it's not exactly the same.  It sounds like we're just going to have to implement a small TFTP server somewhere.

Thanks Andrew.