Chesapeake NetCraftsmen

What's in a name really?  For Cisco Unified Communications Manager the hostname is critical.  When performing an upgrade  to CUCM 6.1 using DMA and changing the host name/IP address of the publisher node, the system services may become unstable and will not stay active.  Issues are also seen where services won't start and RTMT reports errors when trying to gather data from the publisher node.

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When the OS Install Software web interface appears to hang and not process requests to start an upgrade you may need to execute it from the command shell.  I experienced this specific issue on upgrading CUCM 6.1(1) to 6.1(3).  But, knowing how to do what you need to via the CLI is always a handy tool.

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I came across an issue working on a script enhancement for a customer where  I needed to  compare two time/date variables and evaluate the seconds that have expired between them.  The CRS development guide says that using the ".ms" method on a time variable would return epoch time but that is not so, or at least not the case with version 4.0.

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Probably the only thing I miss from Call Manager 4.x (and 3.3 for that matter) is devicelistx.asp.  It was a simple tool provided by Cisco that had a lot of potential for home groan applications.  It also played a large role in integrating CM data with many 3rd party applications.  Now, it is gone and has been replaced with the Real Time Information (RisPort) API.

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Here is a recap of articles I posted in May to my blog at Netcordia:

• "How's the network running? More on SLAs" discusses Service Level Agreements (SLAs) based on network QoS.
• "Anti-spoofing filters" describes why organize should use anti-spoofing filters to exclude packets that have invalid source addresses.
• "Config Policy and Operational Data" provides another example for incorporating operational data with configurations for performing configuration compliance validation.
• "Calling All Devices - What's on the network?" looks at device discovery mechanisms.

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NetCraftsmen provides a UC Optimization service where we will perform, among other things, a general health check on an existing cluster.  Some times this is done as part of a routine optimization task.  As of late, we perform this task as part of upgrade preparations.

Anyone who has run CallManager (CM) on a Windows platform for any length of time knows that performing quick analysis of a problem is a daunting proposition.  There are tools available that can help make analyzing logs easier.

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