I have just accidentally discovered a very strange bug (or feature?) on a snom phone.
It affects 8.7.5.35 firmware and possibly others. When tested on firmware 8.7.5.13 this doesn’t occur.
If you set up a SIP account, any SIP account (doesn’t even have to be a real working one) and the SIP password contains the word “monkey”, you get the following error message and the account will not work:
I have informed Snom about this. I’ve never had a customer reporting this problem, it is just funny.
It is sometimes necessary to perform more advanced debugging on Sangoma Vega’s.
The process is documented here:
I faced a strange problem when trying to SSH onto the Vega from my Debian desktop… the connection sat there and just timed out. I could telnet to the port and was prompted with SSH-2.0-Mocana SSH but nothing was happening with SSH.
I did some digging and found that there was an incompatibility with the algorithms in use in the default configuration.
You can get around this by specifying the following SSH options:
ssh -o HostKeyAlgorithms=ssh-rsa,ssh-dss -o KexAlgorithms=diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 -o Ciphers=aes128-cbc,3des-cbc -o MACs=hmac-md5,hmac-sha1 root@hostname -p2022
Hopefully, this will serve as a reminder to me in future. If someone else finds this useful then all the better!
In May, we were named finalists in two categories in the 2016 Comms Business Awards, our shortlisted categories included: Market Maker Distribution Award and the Market Maker Independent Software Vendor award. Last week both our Managing Director, Darren Garland and Sales Director, Ian Godfrey travelled down to London to attend the awards and we are delighted to have been named winners for the Independent Software Vendor award!
Our independent software, ProSys was launched in 2006 and continues to be developed in-house by our development team. For those who are not familiar with ProSys, it is our online portal which allows resellers and service providers to access a range of tools designed to ease the fulfilment of Customer Premise Equipment, more information can be found on our ProSys information page.
As part of our entry process we were asked to submit a case study which demonstrates how ProSys has revolutionised our customer’s processes. For this we chose to focus on how we adapted our systems to work better for a leading Service Provider, here’s a glimpse of some of the work our development team carried out:
Among our range of value added services, we offer zero touch automatic provisioning for phones, and an API that enables resellers and service providers to integrate their services with ours. Through our API, customer orders can be placed on their websites and fed directly through to our despatch queueing system, however sometimes we need to unwrap our services a little to make them work for our partners.
The service provider in question had their own phone provisioning systems and their own ordering systems which they wanted to feed directly through to us in order to automate their order process. In response to this we created a completely bespoke API for them.
Through our developments, ProVu now sit in the middle with this service provider’s orders; we receive the order from them, translate part codes to their own part codes, ship the items and then they pull the order status information back from us to display on their system and populate their own provisioning server.
This particular service provider had a unique set of requirements which were not available elsewhere in the market. As our systems are developed in-house, we were able to solve their problems and they now have a solution which is entirely within their control, but has all the benefits of the automated ProSys workflow.
Our team work exceptionally hard to develop our systems to ease the fulfilment of CPE and it is a great honour to win such a prestigious award. We are delighted to have been recognised among other leaders in the Channel and are very happy to receive such recognition.
The Gigaset C430H has been updated and has changed to the C430HX. The C430HX looks identical to its predecessor and there is no change to the pricing. The only difference between the two models is the C430HX includes Cat IQ 2.0 technology and supports HD voice.
It has always been possible to manage firmware upgrades using our online phone management portal, ProSys. Support staff can do this very quickly by selecting from a drop-down box of available firmware on the portal.
What happens if you want a newer firmware, or just one which isn’t listed in the drop-down (yet!)?
Well, fortunately, it is possible to provide a custom setting in most cases to allow you to select the firmware you wish to provision to a device.
Proceed with caution…
You can use the “Quick entry” to add configuration settings to an individual device.
This allows you to add (key, value) pairs to the provisioning settings, giving you the power to provision firmware directly.
| key | value | |
|---|---|---|
 |
SYMB_ITEM_BS_IP_Data1.aucS_SPECIAL_DATA_SRV | http://p.gigaset.me.uk/profiles/n510_238/42/fw238.bin |
 |
FIRM_FILE_PATH | http://pana.provu.co.uk/fw/TGP5xx-DECT-22.88_HW1.fw |
 |
firmware | http://snom.provu.co.uk/sw/snom300-8.7.5.44-SIP-f.bin |
 |
firmware.url | http://yealink.provu.co.uk/fw/T41/36.80.23.1.rom |
Warning: If you are not sure you are doing this correctly, then stop! Speak to our technical team (support@provu.co.uk), we are happy to help.
As always, feedback is welcome, so please do get in touch.
With last week’s launch of the new Sangoma PBXact UC Appliances, we are inviting resellers to join us for one of two webinars introducing the series of high-performance communication solutions:
Find out more information and register your attendance
Presenting the webinar will be ProVu’s Muhammad Bajwa and Simon Horton from Sangoma Technologies. We expect the webinar to last approximately 45 minutes.
You can connect to the TG582 router’s command line interface using telnet which gives you a great level of control over this router. You need to be connected to the LAN side of the router, you cannot do this over the Internet (unless you are VPN’d to a PC on the local network the router is on). The default login username is “Administrator” (yes. uppercase ‘A’!) and the password is the web interface password (blank by default).
You will need to have the firmware file hosted on a web server somewhere, lets say the URL for this is http://myserver.com/tg582firmware.bin. The server this is hosted on doesn’t need to be on the local network with the router as long as the router has a working Internet connection.
Iissue this command in your router’s telnet interface:
software download url=http://myserver.com/tg582firmware.bin filetype=firmware
It may ask you for some other options, just leave them blank (by pressing the return key).
Then your router will download, reboot & upgrade itself.
Note: on the new TG588 & TG589 routers there is no need for this as you can simply upgrade firmware in the web interface. Some of these do have a command line interface but it is totally different to the TG582 and doesn’t seem to be very useful (yet).
We are pleased to announce our launch of the new Sangoma PBXact UC phone systems! These systems offer fully featured, commercially supported communication solutions for 10 to 5000 users / endpoints.
Sangoma PBXact UC comes pre-loaded with many advanced commercial features including Call Recording Reports, Conference Pro and Voicemail Reports.
 |
PBXact UC 10 | 10 users / 5 calls |
 |
PBXact UC 60 | 60 users / 30 calls |
 |
PBXact UC 100 | 100 users / 30 calls |
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PBXact UC 300 | 300 users / 120 calls |
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PBXact UC 1000 | 1000 users / 300 calls |
 |
PBXact UC 5000* | 5000 users / 1000 calls |
* System 5000 is due to be launched August 2016
PBXact UC is designed to work seamlessly with all Sangoma IP phones, offering a collection of phone applications which allow users to control functions and settings directly from the screen of their phone. The Sangoma phones also offer zero-touch installation, once plugged in the phones will automatically detect the system and provision themselves.
If you would like to discuss these new systems please email contact@provu.co.uk or call us on 01484 840048. We have a webinar coming up on the 29th and 30th of June to help introduce the range, to register please visit www.provu.co.uk/webinar-pbxact-introduction.
Algo has produced an interesting, easy to follow video with the features and benefits of the Algo 8186 SIP Horn Speaker.
The Algo 8186 is a weatherproof SIP horn speaker which is suitable for voice paging and loud ringing in both indoor and outdoor environments.
You may have noticed we have a new blog!
We have a new design and are using a new blog software (wordpress). The old blog was a little bit dated. With the new setup, we hope to have more members of staff from ProVu writing interesting articles for you.
For the technically minded. We are using Nginx as the webserver and caching layer. The site is fully secure with DNSSEC and TLS. And the site is dual stack with IPv4 and IPv6.
You can test our TLS setup using SSLLABS. You should find we score an a+.