Author: Andrzej Majewski

FreePBX Adding a Cisco SPA525G2 phone

After the initial setup of our FreePBX Asterisk, it’s time to add VoIP phones to our PBX so we can finally start making calls. The first to go will be the very successful, inexpensive, and easy-to-configure Cisco SPA525G2 VoIP phone. It is an improved version of the SPA525G model, differing only in the addition of Bluetooth communication, which allows us to pair our VoIP phone with any smartphone and conveniently switch calls to the smartphone.

This model has five telephone lines, which means it allows up to five telephone calls to be made simultaneously. These calls can be conveniently switched between using the backlit buttons on the right side of the screen.

The phone can be connected with a 5V power supply, or directly from a PoE switch with a LAN cable. It has a colour display with a 3.2-inch diagonal and a resolution of 320×240 pixels. The phone can be easily managed via a web browser.

Cisco SPA525G2 setting a static IP address

After connecting the phone to our LAN, the first step should be to set a static IP address instead of the one assigned dynamically by the DHCP server. To do this, press the ‘Settings’ button on the phone, and then use the cursor to navigate to ‘Network Configuration-Connection Type’ and change the mode from ‘DHCP’ to ‘Static IP’.

Now we need to set the IP address, gateway and subnet mask. So we press ‘Settings’, ‘Network Configuration’ and go to the ‘Static IP Address Settings’ by entering the following in the given fields:

1. IP Address, remembering that both our phone, FreePBX and the router must be on the same subnet. In our case, the router has the address 192.168.0.1, and FreePBX has the address 192.168.0.178. If your subnet mask has the number 255.255.255.0, then the phone’s IP address must be 192.168.0.X, where X is a number from 0 to 255. Of course, the IP address on your network must be unique, so it cannot be number 1, 178, or any other number already in use on your network.
2. Subnet mask – If you do not have more than 256 network devices on your network, it is usually 255.255.255.0.
3. Gateway address – The IP address of your router
4. DNS 1 and DNS 2 – you can enter the IP address of any DNS server, for example 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, or 8.8.4.4.

Finally, we save the settings by pressing the button under the ‘Set’ label.

Cisco SPA525G2 phone settings in the web browser

Once we have set a static IP address for our phone, we launch a web browser on the computer and enter the IP address of our phone. You will then see a window with information about our phone, but only in user mode, from which we will not be able to make the changes needed to connect it to our FreePBX. To do this, we must switch to administrator mode by clicking the ‘Admin login’ link in the top right corner and entering the password. If no one has changed the password, the default login is ‘admin’ and the password is ‘admin’.

After logging in to administrator mode, we go to the ‘Ext 1’ tab, where we will have to enter a few options to connect our phone to FreePBX:

1. Proxy – we enter the IP address of our FreePBX here.
2. Register – we set to ‘yes’.
3. Display Name – we enter any name here that will identify our phone.
4. User ID – here we must enter the number of our Extension from FreePBX, which we created in the previous article.
5. Password – We enter the password we created here, when creating the Extension in FreePBX in the ‘Secret’ field.

We save the changes with the ‘Submit All Changes’ button. The other fields are not relevant at the moment.

Note: Make sure you have entered the correct Extension number in the ‘User ID’ field and the ‘Secret’ password in the ‘Password’ field. Without this, the phone will not register correctly in FreePBX.

After a while the phone will restart and if you have entered all the data correctly, the phone should already be connected to FreePBX, and you should see phone icons on the display, just like in the picture below.

If the entered data is incorrect, or for other reasons the phone cannot register with FreePBX, then you will see raised handsets with exclamation marks on the display, and the phone line buttons will light up red, just like in the picture below.

Cisco SPA525G2 telephone line configuration

By default, the Cisco SPA525G2 phone has all 5 phone lines connected to one Extension in FreePBX. But there is nothing to stop our phone from having 5 different internal numbers assigned.

Note: Oh! There’s nothing to stop our phone from handling 5 different landline numbers if we have 5 FreePBX servers connected to 5 virtual landline numbers, but that’s a story for another article.

To set different internal numbers on one phone, for each of the 5 telephone lines, we must of course have 5 different Extensions in FreePBX. You can find out how to do this in our previous guide on Extensions.

If we have already created additional Extensions in FreePBX, we can go to the ‘Ext 2’ tab by typing the IP address of our phone in the browser (don’t forget to switch to Administrator mode) and in the ‘User ID’ and ‘Password’ window, we enter the number and ‘Secret’ of our second Extension, in the ‘Proxy’ field we re-enter the IP address of our FreePBX and confirm the changes with the ‘Submit All Changes’ button.

We perform similar actions for the remaining telephone lines in the ‘Ext 3’, ‘Ext 4’ and ‘Ext 5’ tabs.

Next, we go to the ‘Phone’ tab and change the numbers in the ‘Line Key’ field for each telephone line.

Cisco SPA525G2 Friendly names instead of Extension numbers

By default, the Cisco SPA525G2 phone displays Extension numbers (using the SUSER variable) on the display, instead of friendly names, for example, Reception, Technical Department, or Orders Department. Sometimes several employees use one phone and we can assign them separate internal numbers with their names. To change this, we must go back to the ‘Phone’ tab in the browser and change the ‘Short Name’ field assigned to each telephone line. After confirming the changes with the ‘Submit All Changes’ button, friendly names should appear on our display.

An additional advantage of this solution is that now when a given employee or department calls other internal numbers, the friendly name of the internal line will also appear on the call recipient’s end, in addition to the Extension number.

Summary

We have just registered our first VoIP phone in FreePBX. It is true that we still cannot make calls to landline or mobile numbers (we will deal with this in one of the next articles), but we can already make calls to internal company numbers if we have several VoIP phones.

The Cisco SPA525G2 phone is the highest model in the SPA5xx series, very pleasant to use and easy to configure. However, not every Cisco phone is like that. For example, the great VoIP model Cisco 9971 with a large touch screen and the ability to add a camera is much more difficult to configure, because we do not change its settings from the level of the web browser, but with each change of a parameter we must create a configuration file and send it to the phone via the built-in TFTP server. But that’s a story for a completely different article.

Therefore, if you do not have much experience in configuring VoIP phones and FreePBX, before buying, make sure that your new phone will be “FreePBX Friendly”.

Extensions are, among other things, all the telephones connected to our FreePBX Asterisk server.

Extension Driver Types

You should know that there are several types of Extension drivers:

• PJSIP – An updated version of the SIP driver. It works with most new VoIP telephones (e.g., Cisco SPA525G2).
• Chan_SIP – The SIP driver that works with most older VoIP telephone models (e.g., Cisco CP-9971).
• DAHDI – (Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface) Formerly known as Zaptel, this is the driver that supports telephones from Digium (the company is now called Sangoma) (e.g., the Digium D60 model).
• IAX2 – (Inter-Asterisk eXchange) is a protocol developed for connecting different Asterisk servers with each other.
• Virtual – Virtual extensions, for example, a voicemail box.

Applications – Extensions

To manage extensions, go to Applications > Extensions. To add a new Extension, click on Add Extension and select the driver or interface type from the list. We will now configure a new Extension using a Cisco SPA525G2 telephone as an example.

• We can click Add Extension and select New SIP [chan_pjsip] Extension.
• Alternatively, we can use the quick creation option by clicking Quick Create Extension.

To start, let’s try the second option: creating an Extension quickly.

Quick Create Extension – Step 1

• Type – Select SIP [chan_pjsip].
• Extension Number – Choose any three or four-digit number. This will be the internal number for our telephone.
• Display Name – Any name for our extension (e.g., Reception, Technical Department, John Smith, etc.). This name will appear on the displays of some telephones instead of the Extension number.
• Outbound Caller ID – We will discuss this later. Leave this field blank for now.
• Email Address – The email address assigned to this number.

Click Next to proceed to Step 2.

Quick Create Extension – Step 2

• Enable Find Me/Follow Me – We will cover the Follow Me function in a future article; for now, leave this option disabled.
• Parking Lot – This feature allows you to ‘park’ calls so they can be picked up from another telephone. In the free version, you only have one option.
• Create User Manager User – This option will create a new user for this Extension.
• User Manager Groups – Select a group for our user. By default, only one group, ‘All Users’, is created. If you have many employees with different permissions, you can create several groups in FreePBX and set different permissions for them, for example, which groups can listen to recordings, which groups can create new Extensions, etc.
• Enable Voicemail – Creates a voicemail box for this Extension.
• Voicemail PIN – The PIN required to listen to recorded voicemail messages.

Note: The default PIN is the same as the Extension number. This means that during the first call to the voicemail, the user will be able to configure it, for example, by recording their own greeting and changing the PIN. If you later reset the PIN to be the same as the Extension number, the voicemail box settings for this Extension will be deleted, and the user will be able to configure the mailbox from scratch.

To finish creating the new Extension, press Finish and be sure to press Apply Config in the top right-hand corner to save the new settings.

Editing Extensions

Once we have created Extensions for all the internal telephones in the company, let’s look at the available settings. Go to Applications > Extensions and press the Edit button next to the Extension you want to edit.

A window with a series of useful tabs will appear. Let’s now discuss the options we haven’t mentioned before.

General Tab

• Outbound CID – Our FreePBX is assigned a single external telephone number, let’s say a London area code, 020. Even though our employees are spread across the UK in Manchester, Bristol, and Glasgow, because they are connected to one FreePBX server, when they call clients, all clients will see the London telephone number assigned to our FreePBX. Statistics show that clients are much more likely to answer calls when someone is calling from a local area code. In the Outbound CID window, we can enter telephone numbers with our local city area codes.
• Emergency CID – This is similar to Outbound CID, but much more serious as it concerns calls to emergency numbers. Imagine our employee working in the Glasgow branch needs urgent medical help and has to call an emergency number from this Extension. They dial 999, but the emergency service sees a London number instead of a Glasgow one, and the ambulance goes to the company’s address in London instead of to the person needing help in Glasgow. This is what the Emergency CID option is for, to ensure that in an emergency, the emergency services can correctly locate the caller.
• Secret – This is the secret password that you will need to enter in the VoIP telephone’s settings so it can connect to our FreePBX Asterisk. We will discuss this option in more detail another time.
• Language Code – Here we select the language for our voice recordings used in FreePBX Asterisk. If you don’t see your desired language, you can install it by going to Admin > Sound Languages.

Note: You can record additional sound recordings yourself (e.g., “Please wait”, “All our consultants are busy”, etc.) and upload them to FreePBX, or you can purchase ready-made recordings. The language of the voice recordings can be set independently for each Extension. So, if we have people of different nationalities in the company, each of them can hear the announcements in their native language.

• Select User Directory – User directory settings. Leave the default setting, PBX Internal Directory. The second option, Property Management, is used in hotels where specialised functions like guest check-in and check-out, wake-up calls, reservations, mini-bar, etc., are required. We will not cover this topic in this article as it is too extensive.
• Link to a Default User – By default, the user is assigned to the given Extension. Select a user with the ‘Linked’ option.
• Username – The username will be assigned automatically, or you can create your own by clicking on Use Custom Username.
• Password For New User – The password assigned to the user.
• Groups – The groups to which the user belongs.

Voicemail Tab

Let’s now discuss the most important options in the ‘Voicemail’ tab, where we can manage the voicemail settings for this specific Extension.

• Enabled – Enables or disables the voicemail box for this Extension.
• Voicemail Password – The password needed to listen to saved voicemail messages.
• Require From Same Extension – Disables the need to enter a password if you are checking voicemail for the Extension from which you are currently calling.
  • Explanation: From any telephone in our network, we can listen to voicemail messages not only for the number we are using but also for any other number, as long as we know the voicemail password.
    1. Dialling *97 lets you listen to saved messages for the telephone you are using. The ‘Require From Same Extension’ option can disable the need to enter a password.
    2. Dialling *98 followed by the Extension number lets you listen to messages from another Extension’s voicemail box, but you will always have to provide the password.
• Email Address – The email address to which notifications about new voicemail messages will be sent.
• Email Attachment – If you enable this option, the recorded voice message will be sent as an attachment with the email notification.
• Play CID – Information about the message sender will be included with the message.
• Play Envelope – Information about the time and date the message was left will be included with the message.
• Delete Voicemail – Enable this option if you want FreePBX to delete the voicemail message from your Extension after it has been emailed to you.

Note: Be aware that FreePBX does not check if the email with the message has reached you before deleting it from the voicemail box. If for some reason the email with the recorded message does not arrive, you will not be able to listen to the message, and you may not even know that a client recorded any message for you.

• VmX Locater – This is quite an interesting feature. We can record a personalised greeting for our voicemail, and the caller will be able to choose one of three options. For example, they could connect to the main telephone in the company (e.g., at reception), or they could forward the call to another Extension or to a mobile number. Correctly configuring this function is time-consuming and will not be covered in this article.

Find Me / Follow Me Tab

Imagine a situation where you are often away from your desk, in another part of the company, or out of the office. You can configure the Find Me/Follow Me function to sequentially ring a set of internal or mobile numbers to try and find you. You can configure this function according to dates and times using a Microsoft Outlook, CalDAV, or Apple iCal calendar. The configuration of this function is beyond the scope of this article, so I will try to write a separate article specifically for the Find Me/Follow Me feature.

Advanced Tab

The Advanced tab contains a variety of different functions. There are too many to discuss in one article, but there is one interesting option worth mentioning:

• Max Contacts – By default, you can only connect one telephone to a single Extension. With this option, you can set how many different devices can have the same internal number (Extension number). You can set any number of internal telephones (including SoftPhone applications installed on smartphones) with the same number, which will ring simultaneously. But there’s a catch: to configure several telephones with the same Extension number, you must configure them using the End Point Manager application. In the free version, you can only configure telephones from Sangoma (formerly Digium). A list of supported models can be found in the Other tab. The End Point Manager Pro version, which currently costs $199, allows you to configure multiple devices from other manufacturers with the same number.

Pin Sets Tab

In the FreePBX Asterisk settings, you can block certain calls with a PIN code, for example, calls abroad or to expensive premium-rate numbers. If we have set up such a PIN lock, by enabling the Pinless Dialing option for an Extension, calls from that number will not require a PIN to be entered. We will discuss this issue in more detail another time.

Bulk Editing Settings – Bulk Handler

Bulk Handler doesn’t strictly relate to Extensions, but it’s worth mentioning this feature because it makes life much easier. If you have a dozen, several dozen, several hundred, or more Extensions and you need to change one setting in each of them, changing it in each Extension separately can take a very long time. You can do it much faster using Bulk Handler. With this function, you can export all Extensions to a CSV file, which you can conveniently open and edit in an application like Microsoft Excel. Changing one function for all Extensions will take a few seconds instead of several hours. After editing the file, you can import it back into FreePBX with a single click and apply the changes. Isn’t that simpler?

Using Bulk Handler, you can edit not only Extensions but also many other options. To launch this application, click Admin > Bulk Handler.

Summary

In this article, you have learned how to create and edit Extensions, which is an essential step to later connect them with VoIP telephones. You also now know how voicemail boxes work.

The importance of a backup is only truly understood by those who have had to recover files from damaged data storage. Server administrators fall into two categories: those who perform backups, and those who will start performing backups. In this article, we will learn how to create backups locally, on an FTP server, on Dropbox and Amazon S3, and how to send them to an email address and via SSH.

Settings -> Filestore

First, let’s navigate to Settings -> Filestore. In this window, there are several tabs, depending on where we want to store our backup files.

Settings -> Filestore -> Local

We will start by creating a backup locally on the hard drive where your FreePBX system is installed. A local copy is useful when you want to test various FreePBX settings and are concerned that changing them might cause your telephone exchange to stop working correctly. However, remember that in addition to local copies, you should also create backups that are sent remotely to an FTP server, Dropbox, etc. A local backup will be useless if the hard drive on which FreePBX is installed fails.

Go to the Local tab and click the Add local path button. A new window will appear where you need to enter:

• Path name: A name for your Filestore settings. It can be anything, for example, Local Copy.
• Description: Any description, for example, Local copy on the hard drive.
• Path: The path on the hard drive where the backups will be stored. We can use variables suggested by FreePBX. For example, the variable __ASTSPOOLDIR__ (remember the double underscores before and after) represents the /var/spool/asterisk/ folder. We can add backup at the end, so we know the files in this folder are backups. Therefore, entering __ASTSPOOLDIR__/backup is exactly the same as /var/spool/asterisk/backup.

Finally, confirm the changes with the Submit button.

Settings -> Filestore -> FTP

If you have access to an FTP server, you should definitely use the option to send backups to it. This significantly increases the security of your FreePBX telephone exchange. If you only make local backups, in the event of a hard drive failure, all local backups will also be lost. If you don’t know how to set up an FTP server at home, you can purchase affordable server space in the cloud, for instance at Zetohosting, where you will also get FTP server access as part of the hosting package.

First, in the Filestore window under the FTP tab, we will enter the settings that will allow us to log in to the server. Click the Add FTP Instance button and fill in the required fields in the new window:

• Enabled: This button enables or disables the data store.
• Server Name: Any name for your data store.
• Description: Any description.
• Hostname: The IP address of your FTP server, or the domain name.
• Port: The port on which your FTP server operates.
• Use TLS: If your FTP server requires SSL/TLS encryption, enable this option.
• Username: The username for the FTP server.
• Password: The password.
• Filesystem type: If you know the operating system of your FTP server, select the appropriate option. If you are unsure, select Auto.
• Path: The access path where backups will be saved. Note: provide the full path (starting with /), otherwise your Filestore will not work.
• Transfer Mode: Choose Active or Passive mode for your FTP server.
• Timeout: The inactivity time in seconds after which the connection to the FTP server will be terminated.

You should receive all the necessary data to configure the FTP connection from your FTP server provider.

Admin -> Backup & Restore

Once we have created a location to save the files, we can go to the Admin -> Backup & Restore window. In the Backup tab, click Add Backup to configure a new backup. For my needs with FreePBX, I usually set up monthly and weekly backups, keeping the last three weekly copies and one from each of the last three months. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from creating daily or quarterly backups. It all depends on how much hard drive space you can allocate for backups. Let’s start by setting up monthly backups.

Basic Information

• Backup name: Any name, for example, Monthly Copies. (It’s worth avoiding special characters in the name. I’ll explain why shortly.)
• Backup Description: Any description, for example, Keep copies from the last 3 months.
• Backup Items: Here you choose which FreePBX modules should be included in the backup. A good starting point is to back up all modules, so don’t change anything here.
• Custom Files: If you have manually copied any files to your FreePBX (for example, via FTP) and they are stored outside the FreePBX/Asterisk folders, and you want them to be included in the backup, you must tell FreePBX where they are located. If you haven’t copied any additional files, you don’t need to worry about this.

Notifications

• Notification Email: Your email address to which notifications about completed backups or errors during backup creation will be sent.
• Inline Logs: Includes logs from the backup process in the email message.
• Email Type: Sends an email notification only if the backup was successful (Success), ended in an error (Failure), or in both cases (Both).

Storage

• Storage location: Here we select the location—which we created earlier in the Filestore window—where our backups will be stored. In our case, it will be Local Copy.
• Append Backup Name as a directory to the Storage path: If you enable this option, an additional directory with the name of our backup will be created in the directory where our backups are saved (in our case /var/spool/asterisk/backup/). In this instance, it would be Monthly Copies. This helps to keep the backups organised and makes it easier to find the one you need in case of a failure. This is why I mentioned earlier to avoid diacritical characters in the name, to prevent character encoding issues.

Schedule and Maintenance

Here we set whether we want backups to be performed automatically at scheduled intervals.

• Enabled: Enables the backup schedule.
• Scheduling: Sets the frequency of the backups. We can set it to run hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.

Maintenance

In this section, we set how many copies we want to keep on the disk and when unnecessary copies should be deleted.

• Delete After Runs: Here we set the number of recent copies we want to keep. In our case, we want to keep the last 3 copies. All copies over three will be deleted. If we set it to 0, copies will not be deleted at all.
• Delete After Days: We can also set a time after which copies will be deleted, regardless of how many copies we have. I suggest setting this to Unlimited.

Note: If we set the first option to 0 and the second to Unlimited, the copies will never be deleted. As backups can be large, you might find that you quickly fill up your disk space.

Hooks

Here you can set what the computer should do before or after performing or restoring a backup. For example, after a backup, you can compress the files or transfer them to a remote server. You can also copy the backups to a connected USB stick—for this, you can mount it in this window before the backup is made. If you haven’t written scripts in Linux before, you don’t need to worry about this.

Warm Spare

If our FreePBX telephone exchange serves a large company and you cannot afford any downtime, you can install a second FreePBX server that will be synchronised with the main exchange. In the event of a failure, you can quickly switch your telephony to the backup FreePBX server. If you do not have two FreePBX servers, you can skip these options.

Save

Finally, we save our settings with the Save button.

Manual Backup Execution

After saving the settings, you can check if the backup is performed correctly by running it manually. To do this, press the arrow button as shown in the image below.

If all settings are correct, you should see the message “Finished created backup file” in the program logs.

To be extra sure that the backup was created, you can log in to the FreePBX console via SSH and check the backup save path, which in our case will be /var/spool/asterisk/backup/.

Navigate to the backup directory with the command cd /var/spool/asterisk/backup/ and list the contents of the directory with ls. As you can see in the attached illustration, an additional subfolder Monthly-Copies has been created. Open this folder with the command cd Monthly-Copies and list its contents with ls. As you can see, the backup file has been created correctly inside this directory.

[root@creativeart ~]# cd /var/spool/asterisk/backup/
[root@creativeart backup]# ls
Monthly-Copies
[root@creativeart backup]# cd Monthly-Copies/
[root@creativeart Monthly-Copies]# ls
20230218-085312-1676710392-16.0.33-1234817093.tar.gz
[root@creativeart Monthly-Copies]#

Admin -> Backup & Restore -> Restore

After creating our first backup, we should be able to see it in the Restore tab. Next to each backup, there is an Actions window where we can restore the backup, download it to our computer’s hard drive, or delete it. After downloading the copy to your computer, you can re-upload it to the server in the Upload your restore files window by clicking the Click to upload a backup file button.

To use the Restore from the cloud option, we must first configure Filestore to have access to cloud file storage services.

Summary

You now know how to automatically create and restore backups both on a local disk and on a remote FTP server. Now, in the event of any failure, you can easily restore your FreePBX telephone exchange to working order.