DHCP set up for Alcatel phone system

Hi all,

Trying to set up the Alcatel OmniPCX Office phone system, but having some difficulty with DHCP. Our DCHP is done from our domain controller server, which is running Windows 2003. We can get DHCP to assign IP address and subnet mask, default gateway etc. no probs. But it's not set up to assign a TFTP server to devices, which is what the phone handsets expect to get in order to download configuration files and startup. We have had to assign this TFTP address manually in every phone currently and this works fine (though took a while - there were 50-60 handsets!), but would like to get it setup so that automatic configuration works.

The DCHP server on MS Server 2003 doesn't seem to have any options for TFTP built in by default, so it will have to be a custom configured option. I read that server option 150 on the DCHP manager should work for this, so I tried setting this up and filling in the TFTP server address, but no joy. I have read over the weekend that it could be option 66 and 67 that need configuring, so I have this to try when I am back in the office during the week. If this doesn't work though I wouldn't know where to go from here. Just wondered if anyone on here has ever had to configure TFTP server via DHCP and how they did it?

Thanks in advance, Kev. :major

 

You have chosen right phone system for your company. Alcatel are one of the best business phone providers. If you are facing any difficulty in the installation then it is better to contact the company, they will provide you assistance to fix the problem.

 

Well.. we had an Alcatel engineer on site and he couldn't tell us the answer!

I sorted this a day or two after the event - will post the answer here in case anyone else has this issue:

We user our domain controller for DHCP, which is running Windows Server 2003. To get this system working, go to the DCHP config in Administrative Tools. For the DHCP scope you have set up, click on "Scope Options", right-click on this and go to "Configure Options". What you're going to need to do is set up option 066 - Boot Server Host Name and option 67 - Bootfile Name. Under Boot Server Host Name, you need to specify the value as the IP address of your Alcatel phone server. The value in the bootfile name can be left blank.

 

if you have more than 1 TFTP server for your phone images, use option 150 instead.

 

Hi,

DHCP is a service to give out IP addresses on the network. It doesnt tell devices which services to offer. A device becomes a server by offering a server.

To make your alcatel phone system become a tftp server you will need to 'tell it', (most likely activate a setting in the web panel) to provide this service.

Hope this helps

Neil

 

For anyone that's interested, we did eventually get this working. The Alcatel phone server had already been configured correctly, but we wanted to use a separate DHCP server (one of our Windows Server 2008 machines) to issue the correct info via DHCP instead of using the Alcatel server for DHCP.

In order to do this, you have to create Scope Options in DHCP under option name 066 Boot Server Host Name and 067 Bootfile name. You can see this in the attachment.

Boot Server Host Name should be the name or IP address of your Alcatel phone server, which in our case is 192.168.0.235. The Bootfile name in our case can be blank - this might vary for other systems but it works for Alcatel. Essentially, we specified this scope option but specified no name, and this is enough information for the phones to find the Alcatel server and get the binaries etc.