A FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7270 has a built-in telephone directory which is
maintained via a Web interface, from which I can create, edit, remove and
backup telephone directory entries used by attached DECT phones. That
is all fine and dandy, but I want to be able to populate that directory from
existing an existing database, and I don’t want to fumble with import stuff
from the Web interface. It turns out that is easier said than done, and it
took a while to find out how to do that. I finally managed, thanks to work
done by Christoph Linder on a Thunderbird add-on called Thunder!Box.
Thunder!Box allows transferring contacts from your Thunderbird-Addressbook to the phonebook of a connected AVM FRITZ!Box FON router and back. You may also use your address book to initiate calls.
A Fritz!Box has a very special authentication handshake, which makes the
implementation rather secure, but tricky to access. (AVM have published a
technical note on this, in German.) Anyways, to cut a long story short,
I’ve implemented what I call fritzuploader
– a small command-line tool
which uploads an XML file containing a telephone directory to overwrite that
in the Fritz!Box’ flash. I’ve been using this quite a bit and haven’t
experienced any problems with it, but note it might quite well fry your
Fritz!Box. Further note, that you should probably use this a bit sparingly, as
the number of writes to flash memory is finite. The Github repository
for fritzuploader contains a sample phonebook.csv
you can use as a
starting point, the tiny csv2xml
converter to create the phonebook.xml
file which is then finally uploaded to the Fritz!Box with fritzuploader
. At
this point the current telephone directory on the Fritz!Box is overwritten, so
you’ll want to back that up first via the Web interface. The resulting import
looks like this:
I’d be interested to hear if you are successful
with other AVM Fritz!Box models.