If you don’t see phones in the “Phones” tab, it may be due to one of the following:
1) The Ethernet switch where the phones are connected is not monitored by PathSolutions. In this case, find the IP address of the switch, enable SNMP on it and add it to monitoring so we can show the phones there.
2) The phone is plugged into a mini-switch under the user’s desk and they have other devices connected there (in this case, the mini-switch would probably not be monitored via SNMP so we wouldn’t be able to see it – refer to #1 above).
3) Edit the OUIFilter.cfg file in NotePad and add the first three octets of the MAC address of your phones, then save the file, so that you can see the IP Phones. Some phone manufacturers may not be listed in the file. The OUIFilter.cfg file can be found in C:\Program Files(86)\PathSolution\TotalView directory.
How to Edit the OUIFilter.cfg file
The first three octets of a MAC address is what is called the “OUI” or Organizationally Unique Identifier. This identifies the hardware manufacturer of the device. If you want, you can look up the manufacturer on the IEEE website (they manage this list globally for all Ethernet adapters in the world):
http://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui/oui.txt
If you eliminate the duplicates on this list, you will get down to a short list of OUI entries that match “what phone OUIs exist on your network”. This is what PathSolutions will look for to identify a device as a VoIP phone.
If you go into the C:\Program Files (x86)\PathSolutions\TotalView directory, you can open the OUIFilter.cfg file with Notepad. Paste these OUIs into the file and add a character and “thephonemanufacturer” as the description. Save the file and then stop and restart the service.
When you go to the Phones tab and click “Update”, these are the OUIs that we will look for on switch ports to say “there’s a VoIP phone here”.