Restricting movement of IP Phones

scottwilliamson · ‎03-16-2010

Hi All,

We have what I assume is not a unique problem:

Being a Local Authority we have many small branch offices and staff in the various departments quite often get reorganised and re-posted to other buildings, we are supposed to be informed of these staff shuffles in order that we can reconfigure hunt groups, our call logging system, etc. However, the problems occur when we are not made aware of redeployments and phones get moved between buildings by the staff themselves, this results in problems with call distribution and recharging for calls.

Does anyone know of a method where we can stop phones that have been moved to another building from operating so the users will be forced to make us aware of the IP phone move?

Thanks,

Scott

Aaron Harrison · ‎03-16-2010

Hi

There are a couple of things you could do..

1) Use port-security on your switches - essentially this locks a MAC address (or set of MAC-addresses) on a particular switch port such that if you plug something else into the switchport it will not get network access (the port could simply shut down until manually reopened, or shutdown for a period of time).

You would really need to adopt this across all your switches to be effective, and disable unused switch ports to prevent those being moved to.

See this for some info on the feature:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst4500/12.2/25sg/configuration/guide/port_sec.pdf

2) I'm fairly sure there are products out there that can map MAC addresses to switch ports, and notify if things move. Perhaps someone else can chip in here?

3) On CallManager, the closest you could do is configure Device Mobility, which links phones to IP subnets. Phones that move to another IP subnet would then be applied new settings from the new subnet (i.e. MRGL, location, region etc) and you would be able to find the phones that are not in their home subnet. Obviously this isn't ideal as it doesn't give you granularity greater than an IP subnet, doesn't track anything but IP phones, won't be the easiest thing to report/alert on, and really isn't designed for tracking - just for assigning optimum resources.

Regards

Aaron

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Aaron Please remember to rate helpful posts to identify useful responses, and mark 'Answered' if appropriate!

scottwilliamson · ‎03-16-2010

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for your response.

We did think of port security but it could be an administrative nightmare due to the number of IPT users we have. 2) sounds interesting, I'll just have to wait and see if anyone else responds. The third idea sounds like it might be worth investigating if it flags up a phone that has moved.

Regards

Scott