Same story here. Grandstream caters to service providers and large PBX installers and do not appear very interested in the smaller user. Based on a rather long history of reading technical documentation, I would have to say their documentation pretty much sucks including their support forum. Don't expect a lot of support from their forum. The only help I saw was commercial interests pushing their own service products. On the positive side, their products are currently among the cheapest around. As time progresses, I'm sure other manufacturers such as Atcom will eventually provide competitive products. In the mean time, I'd suggest the FreePBX forum among others for support on their products. .

As a starter, I've included four options graphics of a successful registration of their HT286 product. I'm sure not everything is optioned perfectly correct but the setting graphics should provide a starting point. My topology is 100% static with no NAT between the phones/ATA's and the PBX. Things need to match between the PBX and the phones and there is a lot of bad or no (from the manufacturer) advice out there on getting the job done. The FreePBX links to the right should provide additional help.

I've had some time to work with the HT502 beast and I think it's best if I pass along my findings. The following relates to Asterisk and FreePBX and not necessarily any other combination. LAN addresses in my case are all static. It's important to realize the Grandstream products are heavily biased towards the crap Windows operating system. The following comments relate to the 502 "User Manual", Firmware Version 1.0.1.54. On page 9 of the manual, the instructions don't work as advertised. It's somewhat important to at least get the net configuration set in preparation for accessing the device via a browser. I found initially the IVR voice prompts relayed incorrect information that was later corrected after doing a reset. Page 6 (Fig. 2) in this manual shows no PBX tied to the HT502. Again, the product seems to be heavily biased to remote service providers not a local Asterisk PBX configuration. Bottom line, Disregard and don't use the WAN port. It is not needed for use with an Asterisk PBX. On page 15, the instructions for configuring the device from the LAN port are basically incorrect. IPCONFIG is a Windows command not a Linux command. They don't tell you that. In my case, even though I used XP and followed their instructions, nothing worked as advertised. Only after reconfiguring the Windows software for a 192.168.2.0 subnet did things start to talk correctly. I did not verify if a reconfigured Linux box would work due to time constraints. Also, under the "Basic Settings", I had to set "Device Mode" to "Bridge" to get access to the device using it's configured IP address.

If you search their website for configuration information on the HT502, you will likely run into .mht files. Warning, it is widely reported that .mht files can easily infect Windows boxes. Firefox won't display .mht files unless an .mht add-on is installed for Firefox. Lastly, the HT502 will do a configuration dump once you get things working. The dump is in the form of "P" numbers followed by a value. No where on the Grandstream website could I find a listing of what the "P" numbers represented but if you do a View > Page Source in Firefox, it becomes fairly clear what the "P" numbers stand for. A listing is also available on voip-info.org site but I don't know if all values apply to the HT502. All in all, I found the device to be very messy to deal with. Many sections can be ignored as they pertain to service providers or operating modes of IP providers. Behind a PBX, many such complexities can be avoided.

Not much to say here except Piaf/FreePBX is more of a memory hog than I expected. I originally installed a 1/2 Gig of memory and as you can see it is not enough. I really don't need a lot of their modules but I will probably bump up to a Gig before I try getting rid of features/modules I don't want or need. Stay tuned for future developments as I uncover things.

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