Being a bit behind on my "to blog" list, I noticed that Linguen, the Belgium-based makers of the Sipcat IP PBX, announced a partnership of sorts with Grandstream. In short: people who buy Grandstream devices can get them configured to work with their Sipcat IP PBX in a sort of plug-and-play manner.

Back when I was mucking about with device provisioning, I explored how various devices could be configured to get their configuration information automatically. Grandstream devices were unique in that all devices by default queried Grandstream directly by default. Grandstream would then redirect the device to the proper configuration server, if any.

My guess is that Sipcat somehow talks to a Grandstream server to tell the device when it connects that it should connect to the Sipcat PBX directly for configuration information. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the situation could comment. I am also curious why Grandstream sees the need to put themselves in the middle of the provisioning process. Personally, I think that's a lame and inefficient way of doing it.

To make matters worse, Grandstream's configuration files are the most unreadable of any of the devices I've played with. At least when I look at an uncompiled profile for a Linksys or a Leadtek device, I can understand the parameters being configured.

All of this is based on some older experience with Grandstream. If anyone knows differently and/or can share "improvements" in these areas should leave a note in the comments.