Conference Now

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Conference Now is a new feature in CUCM 11.0 for ad-hoc authenticated meet-me within CUCM without the need for any other application such as WebEx or UCCX.

Both internal and external callers can use Conference Now. The host needs the meeting number (their primary DN) and pin, while the participants only need the meeting number (access code is optional) and will hear MOH until host has joined.

First thing- you’ll notice a new link in 11.0. Media Resources > Interactive Voice Response, this was created automatically when I upgraded from 10.5. You’ll need to ensure these resources are made available to all parties.

Next, User Management > End User, enable the feature for each host, and add an optional attendee access code.

Last, Call Routing > Conference Now, setup the conference now number and partition. Interesting enough the documentation says that Video on Hold is not supported, but I was able to get this to work simply by leaving MOH Source to <none>.

Read the Official Feature Configuration Guide for CUCM 11.0

VMware for Cisco Engineers pt 2

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As a person who enjoys weekends and sleep, my favorite friday night cutover is one that lasts approximately 30 seconds. To do this, you need three things:

-Enough resources to temporarily have two of everything
-A portgroup configured with an isolated VLAN
-A staging PC for use as an NTP server (I recommend Meinberg NTP for that)

After building and testing your new environment, you’ll want to “flip the nics” to make the new system live:

Connect-viserver vcenter01.dom.com -User admin -Password pass

Get-Cluster “Old-UC-Cluster” | Get-VM | Get-NetworkAdapter | set-networkadapter -Connected:$false -Confirm:$false

Get-Cluster “New-UC-Cluster” | Get-VM | Get-NetworkAdapter | Set-NetworkAdapter -Portgroup “VLAN 9” -Confirm:$false

This is in a sunny day scenario where everything in the whole cluster is disconnected while everything in another is connected. Sometimes you need to apply some logic to exclude some vms that happen to coexist within the same cluster:

Get-Cluster “New-UC-Cluster” | Get-VM | Get-NetworkAdapter | Where {$_.NetworkName -eq “VLAN 3” -and $_.Name -notlike “CUCMSUB2”} | Set-NetworkAdapter -Portgroup “VLAN 9” -Confirm:$false

VMware for Cisco Engineers

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UC applications aren’t only supported by Cisco on a virtual platform now, it’s the ONLY supported platform. As a “Collaboration Engineer” by title, I am usually focused on only a handful of applications, traditionally relying on the “Datacenter Guy” to provide the infrastructure and hope it works. But, it’s always good to see the whole picture.

In my opinion, virtualization is something everyone needs to know at least the basics of. You might not be the one adding a vlan to a switch anymore, but you still need to know networking.

Each VM contains two basic files: one .vmx (configuration) and one .vmdk (disc)
The .vmdk (disc) is considerably larger and contains all the bits a physical hard drive would. The .vmx (configuration) is a small, editable file containing all of the settings a physical bios chip would.

A few items you’ll find in a .vmx file:
numvcpus = “2”
memsize = “6144”
scsi0:0.fileName = “UCCX1.vmdk”
ethernet0.networkName = “Voice_VLAN”
guestOS = “rhel4”
sched.cpu.min = “1300”
sched.cpu.units = “mhz”
sched.cpu.shares = “normal”
sched.mem.minsize = “6144”
sched.mem.shares = “normal”
One task any Cisco UC Engineer will go through at least once is an upgrade from pre 8.6 to post 8.6 version. Two changes come about: an OS change from Redhat 4/5 to 6, and adapter change from flexible to vmxnet3.

One method is to edit the .vmx by finding it on the datastore, downloading the file, making the edits below, and import it back:
guestOS = “rhel6_64guest”
ethernet0.virtualDev = “vmxnet3”
An easier method if you are doing multiple servers/clusters at once is to use PowerCLI
Connect-VIServer -Server vcenter01 -User admin -Password pass
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Set-VM -VM ‘UCCX Pub’ -GuestId “rhel6_64guest” -Confirm:$false
Get-VM ‘UCCX Pub’ | get-networkadapter | set-networkadapter -type vmxnet3

Bandwidth Calc Whiteboard

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So for a g711 call with default payload carried over ethernet:

Total Packet Size: 40 + 18 + 160 = 218 bytes = 1744 bits

PPS = 64,000 (bitrate) / 1280 (payload size) = 50

Bandwidth = 1744 * 50 = 87,200 (or 87.2 kbps)

You could also use the Voice Bandwidth Calculator from TAC:
https://tools.cisco.com/Support/VBC/do/CodecCalc1.do

SQL queries in CUCM

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Sometimes working with a large amount of phones (10,000+) it can take a whole day to export into a csv, and makes more sense to view and manipulate data in the live database. Caution should be taken when handling the live database, so if you are not a programmer, you may want to stick to the canned scripts below as an overly broad query could lock up your server!

I was recently tasked with running firmware updates on a large amount of phones, various models for over 100 device pools. Anything that can help organize and divide workload and cut down on unnecessary bulk jobs is a huge help!

UC Guerilla has a good blog on this here
Cisco’s documentation you can find here, but a tough read for a non-programmer

Count the number of devices per type, total:

run sql select count(Device.name) Device_count, typemodel.name Device_Type from Device inner join typemodel on device.tkmodel=typemodel.enum group by typemodel.name

Count the number of phones in each device pool, sorted by device pool name:

run sql select count(d.name), dp.name as DevicePool, tc.name as DeviceType from Device as d inner join DevicePool as dp on d.fkDevicePool=dp.pkid inner join typeClass as tc on tc.enum=d.tkClass group by dp.name, tc.name order by dp.name

Count the number of each type of phone per device pool, sorted by device pool name:

run sql select count(Device.name) Device_count, DevicePool.name Device_Pool, typemodel.name Device_Type from Device inner join DevicePool on Device.fkDevicePool=DevicePool.pkid inner join typemodel on device.tkmodel=typemodel.enum group by DevicePool.name,typemodel.name order by DevicePool.name

 

Intercluster Lookup Service

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ILS is a new feature service in CUCM 9.0 that allows for sharing of Directory-URIs between clusters.

A Directory URI is much like an email address, formatted like jlevensailor@ciscolab.com where jlevensailor is the user portion and ciscolab.com is the host portion. The user portion is actually case sensitive, but only in the context of CUCM, and is actually an enterprise parameter that can be set to fix this.

The internet uses dns via _sip._udp/tcp or _sips._tls SRV records to route calls between Directory URIs much like email uses mx records. CUCM uses sip route patterns for Directory URIs much like they use standard route patterns for DNs. To tell CUCM that a particular Directory URI is on-net within a particular multi-cluster environment, ILS was introduced.

*It is recommended to first change the Cluster ID enterprise parameter in both clusters to something unique.

To get started, I’ll assume you have a sip trunk has been created already between the two clusters, directly or via SME. Go to Advanced Features and ILS Configuration.

You’ll change the role to “Hub Cluster” and enter the corresponding clusters domain name or ip-address in the popup. For authentication you can either use TLS certificates and exchange certs (default), or you can use a password. Note: The password does require a restart of the ILS service, in case you were already running this.

The advertised route string is what you will create a sip route pattern for on the other cluster, pointing to the ICT so calls can work. When you are done, you can go ahead and start the service if you haven’t already, wait until synchronization finishes and run a route plan report to confirm:

As you can see, any URI on the remote hub cluster will be discovered, not just those that happen to match the advertised route string, which by default is the cluster FQDN.

The call flow is: nbates@car.lab wants to call test@dur.lab. CUCM checks the CSS of nbates@car.lab and proceeds to search for the URI in the list of ordered partitions as usual. When it finds test@dur.lab, it sees that it is a “Learned URI” from sbcucm.dur.lab, and uses the target from the sip route pattern of “dur.lab” I created to call the remote user.

The benefit of this is that sip route patterns won’t have to be created for each remote domain, just one for each ILS partner cluster. I would imagine you’ll start seeing a blank sip route pattern pointed to VCS/Expressway-C for outside domains and a specific ILS route pattern for internal domains/on-net traffic.

Official Documentation HERE

Multithreaded Excel Fix

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Well oh well, I guess it’s been a while since I posted anything. I’ve been so busy lately, mostly working in large bat files or manipulating call manager databases.
Something that ticked me off was how you can’t put windows side by side because they are nested inside Excel. The following code makes all Excel files open in a new window!

*Note this is for .xls files, for .xlsx change the (Excel.Sheet.8 to Excel.Sheet.12), For .csv files, it’s Excel.CSV

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTExcel.Sheet.8shellOpen]
@=”&Open”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTExcel.Sheet.8shellOpencommand]
@=””C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\EXCEL.EXE” /e “%1″”
“command2″=hex(7):78,00,62,00,27,00,42,00,56,00,35,00,21,00,21,00,21,00,21,00,
21,00,21,00,21,00,21,00,21,00,4d,00,4b,00,4b,00,53,00,6b,00,45,00,58,00,43,
00,45,00,4c,00,46,00,69,00,6c,00,65,00,73,00,3e,00,56,00,69,00,6a,00,71,00,
42,00,6f,00,66,00,28,00,59,00,38,00,27,00,77,00,21,00,46,00,49,00,64,00,31,
00,67,00,4c,00,51,00,20,00,2f,00,64,00,64,00,65,00,00,00,00,00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTExcel.Sheet.8shellOpenddeexec2]
@=”[open(“%1″)]”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTExcel.Sheet.8shellOpenddeexec2application]
@=”Excel”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTExcel.Sheet.8shellOpenddeexec2topic]
@=”system”

Cisco MOH file format conversion

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After a googley search, I was lead astray by an older posting on audio file conversion.

I needed to import an odd audio format file into an MOH file on Cisco Call Manager running v 9.x.

I Used Audacity ! from Source Forge !
Changed the sample rate to 8000 – , it was in MONO already – so no issue there. Then exported to OTHER Uncompressed type then OPTIONS – I chose WAV (Microsoft) and U-Law Encoding.
Saved and imported into Call Manger – Call Mangler converted it however it needed to and then it seemed to work !

Wished it were easier – just had to find the right combo –
Ultimately – Cisco wants it in 8000 hz rate/ U-law MONO WAV type.

hope this helps others in a pinch.

Another real easy way to get LIVE audio into a Cisco Voice system is to just use Unity Voicemail that forwards voice messages to an email account. Simply record a voice mail message as the Call handler, on hold message, greeting, etc. and you have an instant audio file in your inbox ready to upload to any system you might be working on. This is especially convenient when you don’t have Vocie Prompt dial-in access.
Again – useful in some situations.

VMware SRM *nix ip changes

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Adding to my post from monday, I had another issue with SRM not changing ip addresses on an Asterisk (CentOS) box, so I had to engineer a workaround..

For PRIMARY = 10.100.1.150 and DR = 10.100.2.150

1. On the linux box, we’ll create two bash scripts, chmod these 755 and stick these in your $PATH.

primary-to-dr.sh
#!/bin/sh
ifconfig eth0 10.100.2.150 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add default gw 10.100.2.1 eth0
done

dr-to-primary.sh
#!/bin/sh
ifconfig eth0 10.100.1.150 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add default gw 10.100.1.1 eth0
done

2. On the vCenter, install WinSCP and run. Create 2 new sessions with saved credentials and name primary and dr. Connect to each session and accept the certificates!
3. Ensure the following is in the windows PATH, if not, add this directory: C:Program Files (x86)WinSCP
4. Create the batch file below to call winscp, start the session and run the relevant script from step 1.

ifconfig.bat
@echo off
echo “Logging into host and running script”
If EXIST c:primary.txt (winscp primary /command “call primary-to-dr.sh”) ELSE (winscp dr /command “call dr-to-primary.sh”)
echo Exit Value %ERRORLEVEL%
TIMEOUT /t 5 /nobreak

In SRM run the bat file, no flags needed.