BIN vs CFG configuration export/import

[Mauro]

Hello! In our T21P E2 phones, we noticed that the options for exporting and importing the configuration are divided into "BIN" and "CFG". Does they have any other difference than just one being binary and the other one plain text?

Exporting to CFG (plain text), it is possible to choose between "static settings", "non static settings" and "all settings", and the proposed filename contains the MAC address of the phone. What's meant for "static" and "non static"?

To save and restore a "base configuration" to be used to quickly configure all new phones (as to say passing the config from a phone to another one, just having to import and then update the account infos only), does it make any difference if I use "BIN" or "CFG all" to do so? Or am I supposed to export/import both of them?

Is there something actually mac-specific stored in the config that I should be aware of?

[jolouis]

BIN is the old format Yealink phones used to use many years ago before the updated configuration style. They used to literally be binary files that you had no way of reading or manipulating.

CFG is what you are after for this case. CFG is formatted text that should contain the same values you'll find in the Auto Provisioning manual and samples.

As for the difference between Static, non-static, and all. If I recall correctly, it's basically:
static : Settings that are provided by Provisiong server and prefixed with static.x.y. These settings cannot be overriden by the user and always apply.
non-static : Only settings that are not explicitly set to static as above. i.e. user defined values, or anything provisioned that was not prefixed with "static" keyword
all: All settings, both static and non-static.

If you are not using a provisioning server you probably will not have any static setttings present on the phone. Just to be safe though it probably makes sense to do an export type of "all" though.

I would also recommend that in order to keep things to a minimum you do a full factory reset of a phone first. Then, login and configure your "template" phone. Finally, export the settings and manipulate as required.

[Mauro]

Thank you very much.

I see in the exported cfg files that there are a relatively small number of settings there, probably it only saves the fields which have been modified from the phone's default values.

I think the CFG option I need is "ALL", as it looks like while most settings are in the "non-static" part, the VLAN settings are in the "static" part.
I'll just have to remember to first choose "ALL" when exporting, as (at least with Italian GUI language) it proposes "static configuration" by default.
Note: the phone wasn't configured by a provisioning server, but manually instead.

I haven't tried importing it back to a clean phone yet, but I can guess the cfg version -for security reasons- doesn't store the password, unlike the BIN version, as I don't see any field for it in the text file.