Cisco Mobile and Remote Access Troubleshooting Basic Connectivity

The Cisco Mobile and Remote Access (MRA) feature is a "client edge" solution that allows external software and hardware clients to register to enterprise Cisco Unified Communication (UC) solutions without requiring a VPN. Like most things, there are a lot of moving parts working together to create a relatively seamless user experience. And, like most things, the first time you deploy MRA there are a few "gotchas" that can eat up a significant amount of troubleshooting time. 

This blog entry captures procedures I use when troubleshooting or validating a MRA deployment. These procedures can be used to validate the initial deployment or they can be used to troubleshoot connectivity problems for an individual user.

Installing Cisco RTMT 10.5 on Apple OS X

"Could you re-post the ciscomonkey.net article covering installation of RTMT on OS X?" is a request I receive at least once a month. Well, the short answer to the question is: no, I can't repost the original content. I wasn't the original author and I am not willing to post someone else's content without their explicit consent. I doubt @ciscomonkey would mind but it still isn't cool.

That said, I have an obligation to my readers and there have been enough changes to the RTMT installer to warrant revisiting the whole process. This article provides an updated step-by-step procedure for installing RTMT on Mac OS X. The procedures cover the most recent Cisco UC applications.

Centrally Refreshing Jabber Contact Photos in MRA Deployments

I have assisted several customers with Jabber deployments lately. Almost all of them driven by the desire to implement Mobile and Remote Access (MRA). Provisioning MRA is not the topic of this article. Instead, I wanted to touch on an operational task that has annoyed me for some time. 

The issue is with caching of Jabber contact photos. Windows and Mac Jabber clients are coded to cache various things. I assume this is an effort to minimize network transactions and optimize client performance. One of the elements cached are contact photos. I have no problem with caching but, in my experience, the issue is that old contact photos tend to be permanently cached and I can't easily (i.e. centrally) force a refresh. 

I played around with some options and found a method that worked in some test environments and my own production environment. Maybe this will work for others. I would be interested in hearing about other options. Please use the comments to enlighten me and others!

CentOS Recovery Use Case 5: Downloading the Tomcat Certificate Private Key

I recently published a blog entry on how one could use the CentOS distribution and Recovery process to access the Cisco UCOS root file system. As noted in the initial blog, this isn't a new revelation. I originally was going to provide a group of use cases in the "primer" but decided that it was a little too long. 

So, I am breaking the use cases out into individual entries. Who knows, over time this may become another series. For now, let's focus on one of the CentOS recovery use cases: Downloading the Tomcat Certificate Private Key.

CentOS Recovery Use Case 4: Fixing Errors with Custom Announcements

I recently published a blog entry on how one could use the CentOS distribution and Recovery process to access the Cisco UCOS root file system. As noted in the initial blog, this isn't a new revelation. I originally was going to provide a group of use cases in the "primer" but decided that it was a little too long. 

So, I am breaking the use cases out into individual entries. Who knows, over time this may become another series. For now, let's focus on one of the CentOS recovery use cases: Fixing Errors with Custom Announcement Uploads.

CentOS Recovery Use Case 3: Fixing TFTP Custom Ring Tone Issues

I recently published a blog entry on how one could use the CentOS distribution and Recovery process to access the Cisco UCOS root file system. As noted in the initial blog, this isn't a new revelation. I originally was going to provide a group of use cases in the "primer" but decided that it was a little too long. 

So, I am breaking the use cases out into individual entries. Who knows, over time this may become another series. For now, let's focus on one of the CentOS recovery use cases: Fixing the TFTP Custom Ring Tone Issues.

CentOS Recovery Use Case 2: License Expiry Issue

I recently published a blog entry on how one could use the CentOS distribution and Recovery process to access the Cisco UCOS root file system. As noted in the initial blog, this isn't a new revelation. I originally was going to provide a group of use cases in the "primer" but decided that it was a little too long. 

So, I am breaking the use cases out into individual entries. Who knows, over time this may become another series. For now, let's focus on one of the CentOS recovery use cases: Fixing the License Expiry Issue.

CentOS Recovery Use Case 1: Modifying License MAC Addresses

I recently published a blog entry on how one could use the CentOS distribution and Recovery process to access the Cisco UCOS root file system. As noted in the initial blog, this isn't a new revelation. I originally was going to provide a group of use cases in the "primer" but decided that it was a little too long. So, I am breaking the use cases out into individual entries. Who knows, over time this may become another series. For now, let's focus on one of the CentOS recovery use cases: preserving a license MAC in your lab or staging area.

Sometimes You Have to Use the Backdoor: Using CentOS to Access Cisco UCOS

It is the middle of the night and you are in the midst of a change control when you run into a brick wall. The kinda wall that can ruin your entire weekend. At a minimum, you have added at least a few hours to the process and boy you are not happy about that. 

Sometimes you just need more access than "the man" wants to give you and you don't want to wait for some tech support engineer to get on the phone to do something you can damn well handle on your own. Yes, sometimes you have to reach into the unconventional pocket of your tool belt and break off a little somethin'-somethin'. This series provides the necessary tools to get access to the Cisco UCOS root file system so that you can get the job done. 

Software Defect Could Affect Custom IP Phone Service URLs

This is just a quick note on a software defect on Cisco 8800 series IP phones that could break normal operations for custom Cisco IP Phone Service URLs. The issue is documented in Cisco software defect CSCur13256 and may break IP Phone Services running co-resident on a web server (such as Microsoft IIS).

My Latest Project - Guerrilla Tools Sneak Peak

I came into 2014 with a goal to blog more frequently than I did in 2013. While I didn't have as lofty a goal as Tom over at networkingnerd.net, I was, shall we say, inspired. I planned on trolling through my "blog ideas" list to churn out some content.  Well, clearly the universe (or fate or whatever) had different plans and I had to adjust priorities. Free time was at a premium and I opted to work on a side project more often than adding content to the blog. Both would have been nice but coding has a calming affect. 

Yeah, I am that breed of nerd that finds solace tinkering with things like coding to center myself. We all need hobbies. Anyway, the side project I have been working on is starting to evolve into the real boy I hope it to be some day. I think it is far enough along to share with readers.

Right now, I am just calling the project "Guerrilla Tools". I'll probably rename it but that is a decision for later. The initial version is focused on functionality that complements one of the prominent series in this blog: the SQL Query Series.

Using the Cisco UCM Route Next Hop functionality for Inter-Office Site Code Dialing

Most administrators of the Cisco Unified Communications Manager are probably familiar with the Hotline Feature that was introduced with CUCM 8.0. At least, that is my assumption. I also think that a fair number of people "discovered" the Hotline Feature on their quest for a solution to "black list" callers based on calling party number. Until recently, that was the #1 use case in my designs. 

A month or so ago, I was working on a design for a customer where the phones were deployed with an E.164 dial plan solution but dialing between office locations required a 3-digit site code prefix. The customer wanted to preserve the 3-digit site codes for calling and called party information elements. There are somewhere around 50 sites. So, we needed a way to gracefully handle any-to-any calling with a requirement to transform called and calling party information based on call origination and call destination. The following gives a summary of the technique applied to this problem.

A Mini-Adventure Using Expect to Query Voice Gateway Configurations

Many moons ago, I started a series on the NetCraftsmen blog site covering various "tools" in my UC toolkit . I never did finish that series out and I may pick it back up and carry it forward. I still get asked about it from time to time and a recent query got me thinking about some of the more useful tools in my toolkit: scripting/programming languages.

I don't want to get into the pros/cons of specific languages here. There are just too many options available and I am not fool enough to consider myself an expert on the nuances between programming languages or development environments. I'll leave that to those who live and breath this stuff.

What I want to do with this entry is emphasize the fact that the greatest tool you can add to your toolkit is "ingenuity". Sometimes you need to go outside of the box and create a solution to your problem rather than waiting for Cisco or some other vendor to solve your problem with a bit of software. 

Personally, if I can't find a way to automate a task using existing tools I wonder if I can build it myself. That doesn't always work (trust me) but it works more often than not and I find the process to be a lot of fun. Then again, I am a bit of a nerd and what I find fun usually isn't by most standards. That's cool, too.

Dealing with Provisional Response and SIP 183 Messages with SDP

A month or so ago, I was deploying a solution integrating SIP trunks from a CLEC with Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) and Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE). While running through the ol' validation routine, I came across an issue with SIP provisional response. Normally, we wouldn't have hit this problem because of the way we provision SIP trunks. However, this time around the integration guide for the ITSP had a configuration requirement that hindered our ability to support provisional acknowledgements.

The interesting thing about this particular issue is that if you weren't looking for it, you probably wouldn't catch it. Normal call setup was working fine. But when you called certain numbers you would receive ringing when you are expecting the call to be treated with an IVR.

There are a couple of ways of dealing with provisional SIP responses. The following covers some of the techniques I tested/used.

Cisco TelePresence Endpoints and IP Address Dialing with CUCM

Cisco has been steering customers and partners to centralize all call processing on the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). This includes video or we can call it telepresence, if you prefer. For deployments where the Cisco Video Communications Server (VCS) is in play with CUCM, Cisco has some general design guidance that is slanted to registering Cisco telepresence endpoints on the CUCM. The VCS being relegated to legacy endpoint registration, protocol interworking, and facilitating firewall traversal.

This is all well and good but there are gaps. One of those gaps is supporting the ability to dial an H.323 party by IP address. Dialing by IP address refers to the ability of an endpoint to set up a video session with a remote party by simply using the IP address. This method is natively supported by H.323 devices. SIP devices use a URI format for "dialing". While SIP URIs can certainly use an IP address as the suffix, that is not the focus here.

How Video Kills the Audio Call with Early Offer

This is a quick blurb regarding an issue someone emailed to me a few weeks ago. It is a pretty straightforward example of why one should pay attention to CUCM Region settings and interoperability parameters of your ITSP before you deploy Early Offer (EO).

Unity Connection Design Guide Drops 90ms from Latency Budget

This is just a quick note concerning a documentation change in the Unity Connection Design Guides. A few days ago one of my teammates was working on a Unity Connection design for a customer and came across a change in the network requirements for clustering Unity Connection over the WAN. Apparently, Cisco modified the clustering requirements section in the Unity Connection Release 8x and Release 9x design guides. 

The bandwidth requirements remain the same as they were when 8x was released. However, the round trip time (RTT) requirements have changed from 150 ms to 60 ms. Which is quite a big jump. It looks like this change was made on August 29, 2013.

This is more than a little disconcerting because I was looking at the design guide in July and made design recommendations based on the previous RTT requirement. Fortunately, my customer's network can still accommodate the updated budget. But what if that wasn't the case and I had to make a major design change in the middle of the project? Or worse, what if I didn't go back to re-read the design guide and the customer ran into an issue? 

Basically, I would have been screwed. Again, I am fortunate that we are still within budget and that I generally pick the lowest common denominator for clustering over the WAN designs. Which, prior to August 29, 2013, was 80 ms RTT for CUCM clustering. Interestingly enough, UCCX clustering also has a 80 ms RTT budget. It is odd (to me) that Unity would drop below the 80 ms threshold. 

Last point of interest. The UC 9x SRND still states that the maximum Round Trip Time (RTT) budget is 150 ms. That is probably still there to keep things interesting for the operators in the field! Obviously, it is best to err on the side of caution and assume the SRND recommendation is no longer valid.

I tried to find more information to see why the sudden drop in RTT budget. I suspect there may be a defect or some other revelation. If anyone has more information please post a comment. I am genuinely curious.

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Thanks for reading. If you have time, post a comment!

Checking Peer Firmware Sharing using SQL

For this installment of the SQL Query Series I am going to keep it short and sweet. I was recently doing implementation planning for a project where we need to update the firmware on a few thousand phones. One of the things we like to do is leverage Peer Firmware Sharing to shorten the time needed to push out firmware upgrades. 

One of the pre-requisites to leverage Peer Firmware Sharing is to actually verify it is enabled. This is the perfect job for SQL.

Finding Orphaned User Device Profiles for EM

This installment of the SQL query series is a response to a question posed by a reader. The reader posted a comment on the blog entry: Using SQL to Validate CUCM Extension Mobility. The reader asked if it was possible to find "orphaned" extension mobility profiles using SQL? 

This is definitely possible and is actually pretty straightforward. 

Enabling Local IP Address Dialing on a Cisco VCS Control

I recently fielded a question about IP address dialing and the Cisco Video Communications Server (VCS). It reminded me of a video design I put together a while ago and I have been meaning to put some more video / telepresence content on the blog. To that end, I figured I would share my approach to enabling IP address dialing with the Cisco VCS.