Nortel 2050 softphones

I deal with these softphones a lot at my work. I manage a Nortel cs1000 PBX. And, almost all my subscribers use the 2050 softphone. As I've gotten used to the particulars of these little software phones. I thought there was a few things I could share here that might make life easier on someone else. There is not particular structure to this. Just a kind of random list or "brain dump" if you will.

- the older version of the softphone is prefered (2.60 or earlier) if you can get it because it doesn't require a licence. So, long as you've got a Nortel PBX or BCM that has 2050 licenses available for IP users, then you can install this code over and over again.

- unless I've not been shown yet, there is a big security flaw with the 2050. It's simply this. If I have access to your network, and I have a basic idea of what your TN numbers are. I should be able to take a laptop with a 2050 softphone installed on it and hunt around through the TN's until I find an available one. The only way that I've found to prevent this would be to collect the IP address or MAC address and build some kind of an ACL list in the switch to keep out un-registered devices.

- for the most part, the phone is pretty reliable. I rarely have them lock up on me. However, what I do get sometimes is my users having troulbe with the phone when they're connecting to the PBX from a remote office via a VPN connection. (phone wont' connect or if it does, no audio)This is a common problem and you can search the web and find tons of write-ups about this. But, not a lot of fixes.

- the 2050 seems to work "ok" in a Citrix environment. I've done some initial testing and in my experiement, my citrix server was 500 miles away from my pbx. And, my terminal (the computer I used to connect to the citrix server) was 500 miles away from the citrix server. So, considering that the audio leaving my mouth had to travel 1000 miles before it even began it's journey to the other caller, I though the delay was not bad. And, the audio quality was "acceptable".

- One bad thing I've been wrestling with lately is some of my users registering withe wrong TN and as a result registered with the wrong DN (phone number). At first this was a real problem when I couldn't find out who it was (yes, this was after I'd tried to call the DN to ask them who/where they are). Eventually, I did find a way that you can identify the IP address of the TN user. But, if they away from there desk for an extented period of time, I don't have a way to kill their softphone so I can re-claim the TN for the rightful owner. Yeah, doesn't seem like a big deal until it's your boss that can't start his phone because some other numb skull has his TN.

Well, that's if for now. I'll have more to say about the 2050 and NORTEL stuff soon.