A change of pace

I know that those who do bother to read my blog for informational purposes or research are probably wondering why I haven't posted in a few months. I'm just going to put it out there now, I lost my job due to financial cut backs at my last company. I've been searching for new work and have a tentative start date with a new company as in instructor, where I first started out after exiting the US Army. It hasn't been easy, but I've managed all these weeks. Unfortunately, my voice career is probably over as I am going back to Route/Switch. I will be slowly converting this blog over to match that change. It isn't something I wanted to do but it was an excellent opportunity for me to go back to being an instructor. Maybe I will end up teaching VoIP/Telepresence in the future, I don't know. For now, those that want to keep reading, I will be posting more educational content rather than one off issues since as an instructor, I will encounter far less field issues and far more educational things that people may not know or fully understand. I hope that the few readers that I had will not abandon this blog. In fact, I will probably be posting more content than ever since the CCNA R/S books don't really make it easy to learn all the material. CBT Nuggets and Lynda.com are valid other resources but it's always good to see someone's personal perspective. Until later!

Cisco 8841 to Analog Paging Choppy Audio

I know it's been awhile but things have been a bit slow around here so I've been using my spare time to learn Linux inside and out the best I can.  Figured another technology under my belt surely can't hurt anything.  Last week however was a change of pace with a strange issue.

I have a customer that is experiencing choppy audio when dialing their analog paging system.  They are on 10.5(2) so everything in place works and is supported even prior to their upgrade.  Their 8841s go off hook and dial a paging number that hits a voice gateway and then pushes out an FXO port to their paging system.  Every time they call the number the overhead paging sounds like crap.  At first, they thought the paging system was bad but with a buttset hooked up to the POTS line going to the paging system, everything sounded fantastic.  That leaves Cisco's side of things.

I had to rule out the DSPs and the FXO port.  I had them make a call and after a "show voice call x/x/x" and saw nothing out of the ordinary.  Logs on the gateway were also fine so what the heck?  They only have a two port FXO card so I wasn't about to ask them to pull their primary line inbound to test.  I instead asked a coworker to go on-site and with a spare FXO card that we know works.  We swapped out the card and the same thing still happened, so piss!

After that fiasco, we went back to the drawing board and tried dialing from a phone that isn't an 8841 and everything sounded good.  That old 7912 from over ten years ago still works and pointed the finger to the 8841.  I don't know if it's the G.722 codec, firmware, or somehow and someway SIP is screwing up the call setup using a weird codec but I will need to pull logs to find out for sure.  I need to schedule another test call with them and pull logs relevant only to that time period so I can get a fresh cap.

Hopefully this pans out to be firmware but with it suddenly happening who knows.  I don't see SIP screwing up since it's just a SIP phone pushing to an H.323 gateway.  At that point CUCM should have already done the heavy lifting of protocol conversion.

Out of Compliance on CUCM and need to delete some devices?

I discovered today that CUCM does the same thing Unity does if you let it lock out due to being out of compliance in the PLM.  If you reboot the CUCM you get 24 hours to remove whatever may be causing you to be out of compliance.  I discovered this through a TAC case as a customer had let their system lock out after the grace period and I was in a hard place to tell them either buy more licenses or leave it.  I knew Unity in fact let you reboot and fix the problem and apparently this is also a think as of CUCM 10.x.  Good news, didn't have to make a customer mad!

Cisco UCS Password

Well the holidays are over and everyone is back to the daily grind.  I know it's been awhile but I was reading an article that was a bit stunning.  Apparently Cisco changed the UCS default password on the C-Series UCS servers from "password" to "Cisco1234".  As of a few days ago this was brought to light and now people can stop calling TAC.  Why was this done and then not propogated down to the users?  Who knows.  Here is a link to the article that explains it all.  Glad someone posted it!