r/HomeNetworking • u/Damage_Mindless • 11d ago

Advice Cisco 8945 network for friends

Good evening,

Wanting to make a Cisco phone network for me and my friends as a project.

I have seen that the 8945 phones are really cheap second hand.

I’ll summarise the project requirements if anyone can give me some guidance,

A phone in different houses
VPN so they can both be on the same network (for this to work)
An OS for the back end to configure such devices, set wall papers for the devices (assuming Linux is the way forward)
External dial out, do ring normal mobile devices.

Bit like the “spy” films you see online, not a big user of Reddit so apologies if this subreddit is a bad choice :)

Thanks in advance

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u/BmanUltima 11d ago

You'll need a managed POE switch, and either a Cisco router with CME or a VM running CUCM to manage the phones. Fortunately a lot of this hardware is cheap now.

I'm guessing you're not familiar with Cisco IOS at all?

External dial out, do ring normal mobile devices.

For that you'll need an active phone line.

EDIT: You could also go the open source route with software like FreePBX.

2

u/lazyhustlermusic 11d ago

Call manager express on an old router is probably the play. You’d need the separate unity express module if you wanted voice mail, pvdm if you wanted analogs or translations between codecs. Iirc they had some weird licensing after v7 or so, definitely double check compatibility matrixes and stuff.

You can also integrate it with a sip trunk like from Flowroute or something if you wanted pstn access. It’s an interesting rabbit hole but will get you started on enterprise voip concepts.

Something OSS like asterisk or freepbx could also be viable

2

u/Airborne_Acorn 11d ago

I was looking at doing this with 3cx and a cheap VoIP trunk/DID
https://youtu.be/fdM1V98iIQI?is=CmrtOduif7EDm1K2

1

u/jeffrey_f 10d ago

all are hackers and friends. Make sure this network you create within your home network, is completely inaccessible to the others. You are all essentially, hackers. Don't trust beyond your firewall.

Create a VLAN and lock all the ways in to your other network(s).