Mitel phone at home

[eric_ng]

Hello,

When users are working remotely, is it possible for them to connect their Mitel 5320 phones to the laptop and work as if they were in the office? Connecting directly to the router?
VPN is available to connect to the office network. Totally clueless regarding this topic.

[wiseguy]

Through a VPN could work if the home connection is a transparant connection. Better solution would be using a MBG for Teleworker solution.

[acejavelin]

The key to remember here is that the 3300 does not support NAT translations by itself... If you have a hardware VPN to employees homes, then yes it should work. If they are connecting a client software to your corporate network, you MIGHT be able to get it to work with Internet Connection Sharing of your computer, but that is hit and miss at best even for technicians, for a regular end user, I really wouldn't recommend it.

Rather than using a hardware device, if the remote computers already have a VPN connection, you could likely just us a SIP softphone like Bria or X-Lite much easier than trying to make a soft vpn work for a PC and phone at the same time.

Like wiseguy said though, a MBG would be a simple way to allow phones to be moved outside of the firewall and securely connect back to the system from anywhere in the world.

[idxman01]

Agreed, have used a MBG with the phone (5320e) in teleworker mode and have recently disabled teleworker and gone with a hardware ipsec vpn.

Not sure how feasible the hardware VPN is for wide-spread deployment, but it may also have other benefits.  (ease of general network access)  At the moment I'm using a EdgeRouter X SFP (X w/o SFP is about $20 cheaper) and it's pretty solid.

[eric_ng]

Thanks for the information.

Can someone explain how MBG works? Since it's connecting from the user's home, I'm assuming I have to configure firewall rule to allow that connection, or does MBG have it's own way to contact the 3300 controller?

I was told to program the external IP of MBG onto the phone.

[acejavelin]

Thanks for the information.

Can someone explain how MBG works? Since it's connecting from the user's home, I'm assuming I have to configure firewall rule to allow that connection, or does MBG have it's own way to contact the 3300 controller?

I was told to program the external IP of MBG onto the phone.

MBG is the Mitel Border Gateway... the best way to set this up to put it on the edge (border) of your network, the box (or VM) would contain 2 NICs... one on the public internet, and one to the voice VLAN. The MBG handles all the translations, you don't touch your firewall, the MBG is a full blown firewall as well.

Phone <-> MBG <-> 3300

The MBG can also sit in the DMZ (a TRUE DMZ) but to be honest we have more issues setting it up this way than with 2 NICs.

And yes, you put the phone in Teleworker mode, plug in the public IP address of the MBG, and your basically done other than possibly a one time TW ADMIN password entry, and the phone just works 99% of the time (there are occasional issues with the remote end firewall, but it's got to be pretty locked down, not a typical SOHO router).