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remove the need to register Devices on Call Manager

Hello,

We are facing a problem and can't figure out anyway to get around it.

We want to deploy Cisco IP communicator and Cisco Mobile to our employees. The issue is with registering all the devices in the Call Manager. Registering all the phones is already painfull for large organizations, but doing the same with laptops and mobiles is simply not manageable. Users change laptop and mobiles phones way more frequently than a fixed phone. Registering all the laptop ethernet and wireless MAC address and SmartPhones mac address in the Call Manager and keep all those up to date is too much time consuming and simply not duable. I'm looking for a way to allow any device to register to the Call Manager.

Yes there is the auto-registration feature, but it was not meant to be permanent and phones are assigned a DN from a pre-defined pool and use a pre-defined CSS. The problem is that in our case we support offices in different countries on 1 single Call Manager so after devices auto-register, we still need to move them to the appropriate Pool assign them the appropriate CSS, etc...

In the ideal world I would like the device to auto register, get an infrastructure DN, be placed into the appropriate pool, assigned to the appropriate CSS... based on the subnet of the device.

Is there any way to achieve something similar with the Call Manager (we are running 8.5) ?

As a side note, I don't really understand the need for registration for security. In most cases a device needs to have a certificated or be registered somewhere (AD) to get an IP address, so just the fact that the device has an IP means that it is a trusted device....

2 Replies 2

Aaron Harrison
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

Hi

I'd suggest you look into the following:

1) Device Mobility - this feature allows you to assign CSS, device pool settings etc to phones based on their source IP address. You would basically want to create a large Dev Mobility group for cluster, acreate all your IP subnets and assign them to physical locations, etc. Search for the documentation, chapter 20 of the 8.0 SRND has a reasonable description of how the feature works and it's limitations etc. Hopefully this would allow you the functionality you need.

Be aware however that it doesn't change the assigned properties of the devices in the admin pages... just what is actually 'used' by the phones so it does add some troubleshooting complexity.

2) Re: CIPC - you don't have to use the device MAC address.. and you wouldn't want to - as this would lead to creation of lots of auto-reg devices, and chew up licenses etc as well as leaving lots of dead wood in your config. You can assign a non-MAC specific name at install time like so:

msiexec /i CiscoIPCommunicatorSetup.msi /qb

FREEFORMDEVICENAME="freeformdevice"

If you want to adjust it post install (perhaps with a login script or other automation) the name is stored in a reg key so you might be able to overwrite that - on my current installation it's at HKLM/Software/Cisco Systems, Inc./Communicator, the value is called HostName (or in the WOW6432 node equivalent on Win64). It's common to set this to (for example) the users's AD username or something similar.

3) For Personal Communicator I don't think this supports auto registration, or at least I've not seen it happen. You'd have to configure these but if everyone has them you could potentially automate it.

I think what you really need is to look into getting things automatically provisioned - using AXL (a config API) to push elements into CUCM based on creation of users in AD etc.

Regards

Aaron

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Aaron Please remember to rate helpful posts to identify useful responses, and mark 'Answered' if appropriate!

Thanks for your detailed reply. This is very interesting. I'll look in all those feature and test them. Lot of new stuff to play with...

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