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…

(more…)

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 ::
(more…)

Applied is a great opportunity for me in Austin. Their main data center is here in Austin and really puts me in the right place in the company to grow and stay local. I have the opportunity to work on many different areas of technology including :: wireless, voice, data center, storage and security. I’m currently focusing on a lot of the new data center technologies which is quite a bit of fun. I’m mainly project-based which allows me to focus more on design and implementation, not to mention the great hands-on experience.

Last week I racked 2 brand new Nexus 7000 switches to be used for our future distribution upgrade. I also got to install 2 of the brand new ASR 1000 routers as well as 2 6509E chassis with the new Virtual Switching supervisor. I can’t wait to start implementing them into our existing network. It’s nice to be hands-on again. Not to forget all the new toys to play with!

Ted

P.S. I am still working on my second CCIE in Voice as that’s still very important to me.

Raj

(more…)

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 ::

(more…)

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).

(more…)

Voice over IP Security

Cisco Secure Firewall Services Module (FWSM)

Applied Security Visualization

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?

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

-Blended Learning Solution
-Boot Camp
-End to End purchase

Use this coupon code

TRomer

Pretty nice deal. Any little bit helps when you’re trying to scrape together cash for CCIE expenses (believe me, I have spent my fair share of cash!)

Deuces,

Ted