That time when you just want something to work...

Today was a normal day for the most part minus my frustration for more than half of the day.  I was doing my usual thing and loaded up a BAT file to push to CUCM 9.1 and had a few errors on the job scheduler.  Rather than delete what was put in and what didn't quite make it I hand jammed about 4 phones in, wasn't a big deal anyways.  My third BAT push for some 8831 conference phones failed miserably in addition to a 7965 + 7916 side car entry.

It turns out that CUCM 9.1 was a bit to early in release for 8831s and 7916s.  I ended up getting the .COP file for both which is basically just a device pack with the firmware.  I fired up my FreeFTPd eagerly ready to push the files into the CUCM OS Install/Software Upgrade menu.  4 hours later I was still sitting there empty handed.

First I thought it was my FTP program despite using it all the time for everything.  I swapped it out for Core SFTP mini and got the same result.  By this point I was confused and figured I would try different browsers.  I've done this a million times, so why today was this not working?  I could access CUCM, ping it, and push TFTP files into the TFTP directory with no issues.  I decided to run a ping from CUCM to my laptop, of course it bombs out yet my ping to CUCM was fine.  At this point I deduced it was the VPN tunnel that I was using to access the server.

It's 1530 (3:30 PM) and at this point I've exhausted all means of getting these two tiny files into the OS.  You can't pull from the datastore via FTP without some convoluted process and I didn't want to end up breaking something that wasn't broken to begin with. You can't turn the file into an ISO since it's just a cop.sgn file.  A full blown upgrade .ISO would work no problem, but not for this instance, DVD/CD isn't a valid option.

Around 1600 (4:00 PM), a buddy of mine calls from our main office about an hour away and asks how I'm doing.  He knows I'm utterly pissed at this point (yes I swore, I need to vent).  He mentions the one thing I didn't think about, make another VM with Windows.  My other co-worker in the other room rolls in and says "Why don't you just use "Damn Small Linux"".  I was like, what the hell is that?  Apparently its a 50 MB Linux OS stripped down for barebones function with a GUI, how cool is that?

Ultimately, tomorrow I am going to fire up another VM on the host ESXI machine and get this file transferred.  Why spend all this time doing this you might ask?  Well, the place is only 20 minutes away but we are also doing a switch install for them and right now the building isn't completely finished.  That means I would have to inconvenience someone at one of the primary buildings and steal an IP from them for about 20 minutes.  Not only am I wasting someone else's time but I am also wasting fuel to get out there when we are already scheduled for next week as the day to deploy all of this stuff.

When it comes to getting things done remotely and I have the time to spare, I always exhaust every possible means to get the job done without visiting on site.  Anyways, the real point of this post was to show the things you can't do with CUCM as well as show what DSL (Damn Small Linus) is.  Truly a masterpiece, especially when you are using a VPN and have limited bandwidth.

I'm going to go ahead and leave this link here for y'all http://www.damnsmalllinux.org.  I haven't tried it yet but plan on tomorrow first thing.  I think it's a better alternative than slamming a few gigs down the VPN pipe to load Windows if I can help it!  The greatest part, it's a live bootable image so nothing other than having around a gig of drive space and maybe 512 MB RAM is all you need (128 minimum).

The above pictures are some screenshots of DSL.  50 MB is pretty light, I am excited to get try this.  In fact, I might keep this ace up my sleeve for future issues when I can't get something to work remotely.  As always, I hope this post has been hilarious and informative at my expense.