VoIP on HSMM-MESH

Since working on a HSMM-MESH™ installation at Mercy Medical Center here in town has been thrown into neutral for the time being, I've been focusing my attention on playing with VoIP over the mesh.

A while ago I acquired a Polycom IP500 phone to play with and it has been interesting to say the least in getting it working.

First off, the phone requires a FTP or TFTP boot server on the network to pull the application software and configuration files at bootup.  After many trial and error sessions I finally got the phone to boot from a TFTP server on my desktop and can make SIP phone calls directly between my computer and the phone, no SIP server required (after finding out that the sip phone address is SPIP@<ip_address>).

The only logical progression is to move the TFTP server from my computer to the HSMM-MESH™ router that the phone is plugged in to so I don't have to have a computer running to get the phone booted.  Of course, nothing is that simple.  Much consternation ensued again until I stumbled onto a forum post advising that apparently there is a bug in the Kamikaze 7.09 OpenWRT firmware that a dependency package for atftpd, libreadline, is not in the 7.09 repository so you have to install it manually from an earlier repository.  Easily done by executing the following command before installing atftpd:

ipkg install http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/7.06/brcm47xx-2.6/packages/libreadline_5.1-1_mipsel.ipk

The next goal will be to move the Polycom to a separate mesh node and try to make a call over the mesh.


Relevant links:
http://support.polycom.com/PolycomService/support/us/support/voice/soundpoint_ip/soundpoint_ip500.html

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=8495


ToTD: It would probably be a good idea to start keeping copies of any downloaded packages on a flash drive.  Never know when I'll have to do field work on this project without access to the Internet.