Recording MAC Address for Auto Registered CME Phones: CME Registration Made Easy!
CME has a concept of auto registration where, in fact in the default state, CME will allow (once some preliminary configuration parameters have been met) phones to register automatically. The catch is that the MAC address is not stored in the configuration file. If an ephone does not have a MAC address in the configuration, there's not much you can do with it. You can't assign buttons, phone types, or much anything else for that matter. CME spits back at you, asking you to configure a MAC address first. In the past, I've run "show ephone summary" to glean the MAC address of any registered ephones. Tonight, actually by mistake, I found that this is unnecessary. There's a much easier way, that can save you time and frustration.
First, lets look at "show ephone summary":
ephone-2[1] Mac:001A.6BCE.3DC8 TCP socket:[1] activeLine:0 REGISTERED
mediaActive:0 offhook:0 ringing:0 ringRate: 0 reset:0 reset_sent:0 debug:0
IP:192.168.254.1 CIPC keepalive 0 1:0 2:0 3:0 4:0 5:0 6:0 7:0 8:0
Max 58, Registered 1, Unregistered 1, Deceased 0 High Water Mark 59, Sockets 1
ephone_send_packet process switched 0
Next, enter configuration mode, and configure the ephone. Specify mac-address, but don't actually enter a mac-address. Observe the results.
CME(config)#ephone 2
CME(config-ephone)#mac-address
setting mac-address automatically to 001A.6BCE.3DC8 for ephone 2
phone registration type= CIPC
At this point, not only is the MAC address assigned, but the phone type, too.
Cool - that could've saved me some time in the past! Apparently the feature has been available since CME 3.0... I guess it pays to read the fine print.