November 18, 2008 by ted.

The Embedded Event Manager (EEM) is nothing new to the IOS. It has been around for a long time but is very underutilized (mostly because people don’t know about it).

EEM is great way for those who love scripting and automation to make your networking devices do some interesting things. How about having a script that automatically assigns VLAN and QoS configuration to an access port when detecting an IP phone connected (via CDP)? You can do all sorts of cool things. You can have a script that disables ports at certain times of the day to save power. It doesn’t sound like much, but on a large scale it could be significant (great for companies trying to work on their “green” initiatives). Cisco is doing some cool things in the future regarding power savings.

On the voice side, I always hated having to track intermittent drop call issues. You can look at a trace and see the “disconnect” from your voice gateway, so you will want to look at Q931 debugs. Looking through a syslog server full of Q931 logs isn’t going to be fun. (try a call center where hundreds of calls can come in on 5 different gateways with 5-6 PRIs each). What you can do is enable the 931 debug, use EEM to parse through the syslogs and when it finds a certain cause code or calling/called number, you can have it create a file on the flash with just the info you care about. You could also have it send a trap alerting you if you felt so inclined. Much easier than waiting on the customer to “alert” you when they have another dropped call, only to find out the traces are overwritten…

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November 18, 2008 by ted.

Call home is a really cool feature that allows you to be a little more proactive on your network. Instead of relying on your SNMP poller (HP openview, CUOM) to provide you with your network health, the devices are becoming more intelligent.

Imagine a module failing in your switch over the weekend and it being smart enough to perform diagnostics (GOLD), open a TAC SR, and have the module there waiting for you on Monday (if needed right?). You could even integrate it into your current network operations and have it alert you and provide more intelligent alerts. I think it will probably help things get fixed faster and hopefully provide more meaningful alerts.

It’s not currently available on every platform since it’s still kind of new. You will find it on the following ::
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October 19, 2008 by ted.

Hi Ted,

Raj

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October 4, 2008 by ted.

We had this one case open for like a month, and I decided to take a crack at it a few weeks ago. I thought it was a pretty funny issue, that I don’t see too often.

So there was this one user, that kept getting missed calls like 5-10 times a day. And they were always showing to be coming from the Unity server (based on the Caller ID). This was pretty annoying for sure and it was only one user that kept getting these phantom calls.

I’m thinking to myself, when does Unity call anyone? Unity can do message notification right? We get a new Voice mail and we can have Unity page, email or call us. I figured this was probably a good place to start, looking at notifications in Unity.

This first thing I’m thinking is there is no way I’m going through every subscriber and checking their notifications. I knew I wanted to be able to search subscriber notifications and see if any were set to dial her extension (let’s say her extension was 5125).

I opened the Tools depot and used the “Subscriber Information Dump”. You can basically use this tool to write all the subscriber properties to a CSV file and be able to search through them easily. I searched through and didn’t find anything that exactly matched her extension (5125).

I ran this during the day and didn’t affect the system, just make sure to monitor task manager when doing these things. You can also check the “call viewer” to make sure there aren’t a lot of calls to the system.

See below for Subscriber Information Dump location ::

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October 4, 2008 by ted.

I had a nice one-way audio issue I was troubleshooting on Friday.

Here’s the setup ::

Cali HQ site <-----> MPLS Cloud <-------> LA Regional office (PRI located here for LA Sales Office PSTN access)

Cali HQ site <-----> MPLS Cloud <-------> LA Sales office

This is a pretty simple setup where you have the HQ site with Call manager which connects to the MPLS cloud. And you have the Remote Regional and Sales office that also connect to the same MPLS cloud.

The issue was regarding the LA Sales office which was reporting one-way audio issues for outside (PSTN) and on-net calls (across WAN).

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September 23, 2008 by ted.

Pearson was kind enough to send me a couple of newly released books to review. I plan to review them in the very near future!

Voice over IP Security

Cisco Secure Firewall Services Module (FWSM)

Applied Security Visualization

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September 8, 2008 by ted.

I think these are going to be must reads for my Voice Preparation ::

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns656/networking_solutions_design_guidances_list.html

I’m focusing on the following ::

CCM 4.x

CME

IPCC express

QoS–link is broke right now?

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September 3, 2008 by ted.

Got my Voice Blended Learning Solution in the mail from IPExpert. I have started the Video on Demand portion. I’m shooting for 6 months before taking the lab. I have rack time as well from Proctor Labs. I will be starting the Vol1 labs this month.

Here is my book list that I’m using as reference material ::

Cisco IP Communications Express
Configuring Call Manager and Unity
CVOICE Self-Study Guide
Troubleshooting IP Telephony
Cisco QoS Exam Cert. Guide
Cisco Voice Gateways and Gatekeepers
CIPT Self-study Guide

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August 24, 2008 by ted.

Per Cisco’s CCIE web site ::

CCIE labs changing from UniversCD to Cisco Documentation
On Sept 24 2008 CCIE labs will no longer support using the UniversCD documentation for the lab exam.

All labs are migrating to Cisco Documentation only. For those scheduled to take the CCIE lab prior to Sept 24 access will still be available for UniversCD.

The Cisco Documentation pages have the same information that currently resides on UniversCD, please refer to the links on the CCIE web pages to view these pages and become familiar with the new format.

After Sept 24 2008 only the Cisco Documentation web pages will be available for CCIE labs.

Oh well, not very surprising I guess.

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August 20, 2008 by ted.

I was at work today and mentioned I was going to be working on the Voice track rather quickly. One guy mentioned, “There is more to life than studying and taking tests”.

I guess I get bored too easy. Let’s see, watch TV all night, or get to do something that’s intellectually challenging? You have to take breaks or you get burned-out, it has happened to me. That’s what weekends are for. Shoot, I love playing computer games and going out to the movies, but Mon-Thurs is all business for me. Come on, that’s very reasonable.

I’ve been doing Voice all day long at work for the last year, so this is going to be very helpful for me. I’m hoping for a quicker turnaround for the Voice (6 months at the longest). I’ve got to take the Voice written soon, so I need to look over the Cisco website to make sure I’m solid. I’m probably going to bypass the professional level certs for this one… I would rather focus on lab time.

IPExpert will be getting my business once again.

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