As someone who administers a small fleet of Polycom phones scattered around the US and UK I'm all too familiar with the intricacies of their central provisioning methodology. It's not especially difficult, but it can be difficult to justify setting…
A short while ago VUCs Randulo tweeted that he had recently updated the firmware on his Polycom phones. He said that he did this using a local provisioning server setup temporarily just for the task. If you’re using a hosted IP-PBX then you may not have a suitable server running 24/7/365.
If you don’t run a provisioning server all the time then booting the phones can take a lot longer. On boot-up the phones simply fail to contact the provisioning server and eventually boot using their existing internal settings. But this means waiting through a series of time-outs, which is the principle source of delay.
Sometimes its the little things that make life a lot easier. I just found that the latest beta of m0n0wall (v1.3b13) more properly supports the "Next Server" (aka Option 66) feature in the DHCP server. This is really handy for…