[cisco-voip] Serial Number from Call Manager

[Robert Singleton]

I use a handful of Linux command line tools to inventory my phones. No
software or licenses, trial or otherwise, to buy...

None of what I do necessarily requires Linux only, but I think it's
simpler that way.

I use nmap to get a list of IP addresses from the telephone subnets. A
one-liner script uses lynx, a text mode http browser, to gather the
required page from each telephone. I have to make two runs through it
because until I run through the first time, I can't reasonably tell
which IPs are ATA's rather than 79XX phones. The ATA's web page is in
the form of http://<ip address>/dev and the phones are http://<ip
address>.

Then I use awk to boil down that data into a CSV file. I then generate
my reports off the CSV or hand it to users who "need" Excel to sort and
filter data.

I have a single script that runs through this process in about 10
minutes for 800 or so phones. Any interested in it is welcome to it and
more detailed notes.

I use the same technique to get information from http://<ip
address>/PortInformation?1 page which shows what switch and port a given
telephone is connected to, which could also be helpful to an inventory.

While running it from a Linux machine simplifies it for me, I think
anyone who wants to use other tools should be able to do it. The two key
components for getting the raw data is nmap and lynx, both of which are
available for other operating systems, including Windows.

http://www.insecure.org/nmap/
http://lynx.browser.org/

Other UN*X command line tools are available to Windows users from
packages such as Cygwin.

http://www.cygwin.com/