Hello list,

While working for the Counterpath plug-in, I ran into a problem which I 
think can be seen as generic for softphone clients:
The problem is with uniquely identifying a softphone in order to send it 
the right configuration from the pool.
Unlike hard-phones, which can be identified by their mac address, 
softphones (some which might have some sort of serial number) can't be, 
because you can't restrict the provisioning of the softphone to a 
particular instance of it ... that would eliminate one of the advantages 
of softphones: portability.

For example, when provisioning, the Counterpath CMC Enterprise softphone 
provides just the user-name and password, and no other identification.

To solve this, my solution would be to identify the phone by it's first 
user/line (similar to how hard phones are identified when they are 
restarted), but the problem with this approach is:
What should we do when there's more than one phone which has the same 
first user? An immediate solution would be to just grab the first phone 
from the list, and put a warning somewhere so the admin knows that it's 
not ok to have more that one softphone with the same first user.
The only problem with this approach is that some softphones support more 
than one line. So when a user is deleted, we might end up with 
duplicates by accident.
Here's an example:
Softphone 1 has lines: 200, 201 and 202
Softphone 2 has lines: 201 202 and 203.
The admin deletes user 200 =>
Softphone 1 has lines: 201 and 202
Softphone 2 has lines: 201 202 and 203.
so we end up with two different softphones which have the same first 
line. When requested, which profile should we send?

Thought? Other ideas?

Thanks,
Andrei

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