What is the VICIdial registration password?

The Registration Password is the secret your phone device uses to connect to the VICIdial server. It is not the web login. When VICIdial builds a phone record, it generates a configuration entry for that phone, and the Registration Password becomes the secret in that entry. Your phone has to present the same secret to register. Get this one field right and your device connects; get it wrong and the phone never comes online.

Where it lives

For a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) phone the secret lands in the sip.conf entry; for an IAX2 phone it lands in the iax.conf entry. Either way it is the auto-generated Conf file that VICIdial writes within a minute of you saving the phone. You do not edit that file by hand. You set the Registration Password in the phone record and VICIdial does the writing.

Its old name was Conf File Secret

This field was formerly labeled Conf File Secret, which describes exactly what it is: the secret that ends up in the conf file. If you have worked with older VICIdial screens or older notes, the two names are the same field. The newer label, Registration Password, just makes the purpose clearer to someone who has never opened an Asterisk config.

The rules: limit, characters, default

• Length limit is 20 characters.
• Allowed characters are letters and numbers plus dash and underscore. Nothing else.
• The default value is the literal word test. If you never touch it, every phone ships with the secret test.

Leaving it as test is a real security hole, because anyone who knows the convention can guess it and register a rogue phone against your server. The companion article on how to set a strong VICIdial phone password covers what a good value looks like.

How the softphone uses it

On the device side, your Softphone is configured with a username and a secret. The username matches the phone extension; the secret must match the Registration Password. The device sends both to the server, the server checks them against the conf file, and if they match the phone registers. The diagram traces that exchange.

sequenceDiagram
  participant P as Softphone
  participant A as Asterisk
  participant C as Conf file
  P->>A: REGISTER with extension and secret
  A->>C: Look up stored secret
  C-->>A: Return stored secret
  A-->>P: 200 OK if secrets match
  A-->>P: 401 rejected if they differ

If the device sends a secret that does not match the Registration Password, the server rejects it and the phone stays offline. The single most common cause of a phone that will not register is a Registration Password in VICIdial that does not match the secret typed into the device, so check both sides when registration fails.

It is not the web login

The phone record also has a Login Password, and the two get mixed up all the time. The Login Password is what an agent types into the browser to reach the agent screen. The Registration Password is what the device sends to register. Changing one does nothing to the other. If you update the Login Password and expect the phone to reconnect, nothing will change on the device side, and the phone keeps registering with whatever secret it already had. Always ask which symptom you are fixing first: a person who cannot sign in to the web screen is a Login Password problem, while a device that shows unregistered is a Registration Password problem.

Where it fits in the bigger picture

The Registration Password is one of a handful of fields that have to be right for a phone to work. The VICIdial phones pillar guide puts it alongside the extension, the protocol, and the dialplan number so you can see the whole record at once.

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