With Call Manager 11x we saw the deprecation of Meet Me conferences begin. Meetme conferences were great, but many users had issues with using them. This is likely what led to the mass exodus of users to things like webex, zoom, and bluejeans. Today was the first time I’ve ever had the opportunity to work on Conference Now, so I will run through what I did to get this all working. The photos I will use in the guide are from UCM 12.5, but the process is the same in 11x. )
I’ll start off with the bad news. After the two win10 vms were running perfectly for over a year now, I was running updates on my other linux servers… some how i did pay attention and upgraded the distro of my kvm box. It pretty much ruined everything, now I get stuck at the windows logo during boot. I even tried simply reinstalling the vm guest, but when the kvm booted from the win10 iso, it would freeze at… you guessed it, the windows logo.
Today I was cleaning up some CSSs for a client. I came across a particular css that had been erroneously assigned as the line css for a bunch of unassigned DNs (they were precreated to show they were already in use). Of course, I went to BAT first to see if I could just update the line css of the lines, but I discovered that I couldn’t affect the unassigned DNs (even though there is an option for searching unassigned dns…) Anyway, as you can guess, I jumped into SQL to see what I could do.
If you’ve been following me in this 3 part series, you know we started off with around 700 dependencies on a CSS that no longer fits our standard. It was in use by various things and we leveraged SQL to quickly, efficiently, and safely remove it from use. When we finished part 2, the only things still referencing our css were directory numbers. Well, we actually have 2 CSSs we’re going to clean up today.
Previously we had around 700 dependencies on a CSS that no longer fits our standard. This CSS was in use by lines, devices, and users throughout the system. In part 1 we removed this css from the users, now we need to do the same for the devices. As before, we’ll start with a count.
So, at a client of mine that we will call PRO, we had a Device-CSS which seemed to be the default css for pretty much everything, including presence subscription, even though PRO-Subscribe-CSS exists. Well the PRO-Device-css also used a lot of legacy stuff from the PRI days. I wanted to clean it up and swap things to follow the standards we had implemented, which required naming based on the line of business, location, and use. First I modified all the templates to remove the PRO-Device-CSS usage and replace it with the appropriate css. Next I check dependencies, assuming there couldn’t be that many things…
A client was facing some licensing issues with shared devices. After a discussion, we decided to create a local user account for this particular location. Using this local user account, we would assign all generic shared devices (waiting room, lobby, hallway) to this user and save a bunch of enhanced licenses by properly utilizing CUWLs. I provided some guidance and a local admin began the process of clicking a phone, setting the user, saving and picking the next. Obviously this is pretty painful and slow. I decided to see what we could do to speed the process up.
Today, I was working with a client at a remote location. Initially, we prepped a Cisco 4331 to be installed as an SRST-CME device. This particular site has a PRI and a relatively unstable WAN connection. I prepped this router in a different location as we expected no WAN connection once it was installed. As it turned out, the PRI got turned up much earlier than expected, so now we needed to get the phones registered to the router. Well, as some of you may know, you can’t configure a router for SRST-CME AND CME at the same time. Thus begins the process of removing the SRST-CME config and prepping the new config.
Today I was working with a client who was facing some MRA issues for their 8841 handsets and Jabber. I’ve found that typically the issues are around certificates, but this client’s MRA worked sporadically. I pondered this for a few moments and asked the Network Admin to check the ports on the firewall.. as it turned out, he didn’t have access as this was tightly controlled by security.
A little background. I have a 7 and 4 year old who like playing on the computer. Typically they play things like animaljam or nickjr games, very simple requirements, minimal hardware needs. One day, the horror that is minecraft crept its way into my home and suddenly, graphics (seriously? in minecraft, it’s a bunch of blocks…) mattered.