Auto-provision Yealink IP Phones

Auto-provisioning allows us to conveniently mass deploy IP phones.  Generally, we put a set of configuration files containing the sip credentials and other phone settings on a tftp server.  When the IP phones boot, they download the configuration from the tftp server and self configure to work with the IP PBX.

This blog describes the steps taken to auto-provision Yealink T20P and T28P.

When Yealink phone boots, it looks for auto provision information in order of PnP, DHCP option 150 and DHCP option 66.  We therefore could configure our DHCP server to supply the tftp server address via option 66.

For illustration, below shows how to specify tftp server address in /etc/dhcpd.conf in CentOS.

subnet 192.168.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {

        option routers                  192.168.2.1;

        option subnet-mask              255.255.255.0;

        option nis-domain               "pbx";

        option domain-name              "bx";

        option domain-name-servers      192.168.0.20;

        option time-offset              28800; # Asia/Hong_Kong

        option ntp-servers              192.168.2.1;

        option tftp-server-name         "192.168.2.1";

Yealink phones expect two types of XML configuration files: model-oriented cfg and mac-oriented cfg.  A full list of the configuration parameters could be found here.

The model-oriented.cfg for T20 and T28 are given below.

T20 y000000000007.cfg

T28 y000000000000.cfg

A mac-oriented.cfg would look like  0015652e9af6.cfg.

By preparing a set of cfg, we could easily deploy a large number of Yealink phones.